Sailing September 18, 2004.
Zach's first time sailing. An interesting first day.
Well, actually my son Zach sailed with me the first time a couple of years ago. It was a short sail as the forestay broke a few minutes into a rising breeze.
We were lucky we were not brained with the mast, but the tabernacle hinge held long enough for me to get sail down and straighten things up. Zach recently moved back to Grand Forks, so I might have another sailing buddy for a while.
Turns out our cat Digger thought he wanted to sailing this day as well. His favorite places to play are paper bags and boxes....and my sailing bag.
The weather for the day was 'transitional', meaning it was changing. Around here, that often means wind. For me, it was Saturday and time to go sailing...I usually take whatever I can get wind-wise. But, it looked like it was going to be a wind day as it was already windy at home before heading out of town to the lake.
This is how it looked when we got to the launch ramp. Not ideal conditions for launching....but lots of wind.
It's already quite windy. It is blowing over 10 knots here already.
Before we could launch we ended up spending a half hour assisting a couple of fellows trying to get one of those giant square plastic motor boats up onto his trailer. Not fun with so much wind.
Here is when it got interesting. Coming from the South. The start of some serious wind...for me and this little boat anyway. It was a steady 12-15 already and we were running the small jib and reefed one down. You could see this coming from a distance, over the already windy conditions. We met it by going one deeper in the main. So we are now stock jib and double reefed main (reduced by 40%).
Sailing fast with the least amount of canvas I can make. Often doing hull speed at that. Busting through waves.
On a beam reach, waves that broke near the bow would blow sideways right off
the lee side of the boat...before they hit us. That became a good way to stay
dry (er). LOL. I never did get a chance to measure wind speed or take a picture
during the hardest of this wind. Once it calmed down we measured 22knots.
I reckon it was blowing all of 30 during the heaviest of it. We were both on the rail and pinching...and spilling the main and still had the rail in the water. Mind you we were going to windward, close reaching and down to a beam reach mostly. I fell off on a broad reach and even with this little amount of sail I felt way overpowered and would have liked to drop the main and go headsail only to gain some control...but we were having too much fun to do that, so we headed back up into the wind to pound around. Zach seemed to like going to windward, it was more exciting, and to him we seemed to be going faster....although of course weren't.
It was so windy that the tops of breaking waves were being blown off and we saw those white foam and bubble trails in the water. I have never been in such wind before, not on this boat or any other. I have only seen pictures of these foamy trails before.
Me going two reefs deep.
Hard as a plank and half it's normal size.
The wind did eventually die off as it always does around here. We had at least 2 hours of rip roaring wind then sailed over to a favorite beach.
This boat somehow always inspires crew to feel pirateish.
With removing a large part of the stock forefoot, this boat can easily be walked to the bow to jump off onto shore.
Zach going off to find some firewood and chop it up.
My son's perverse sense of humor.
Standard fire starting procedure for a lad growing up with bush parties. Zach mentioned a bush fire his friends and him had years ago. 14 well dried hard and softwood pallets and a gallon of gas. They set it off using bottlerockets
The flames could be seen from miles around. 4 fire trucks showed up.....and the firemen were not impressed.
We go back out looking for wind. With the lull in the wind I did expect it to come from the North this time. Usually the stronger winds come from that direction....so having already had huge wind this day I wondered what we were going to get.
Eventually it did come from the north, and you could see it from a long ways off, only this time Zach figured he was used to the vibe by now and wanted to keep the full main and stock jib. (The Lapper never did come out this day)
Along with the wind came the rain and a real cold snap. The wind that showed ended up being a nice steady 10-12 knoter. We scooted along with full sail. At this point Zach then took the helm to get a feel for the boat and to ask questions and sort some stuff out.
These shots are taken after a huge gust put us over. Ha ha. Zach was driving and I was trying to get a huge, tight, magic knot out of the Main sheet that appeared just this side of the cam cleat. I could provide no slack or relieve the main. When the gust hit, rather than let the natural weather helm take the boat up into the wind, he fought it and made it worse. I dumped the jib, but even with that we were knocked over to far enough for the main to scoop up a shitload of water. I let things settle once were back up and got back to untying that crazy knot.
Oh, the new ballast was the cat's meow for this...she just popped right back up without any help from us. A good, though unplanned, test. ~:0) I guess I forgot to explain to Zach about pinching up to spill the wind, he learned that lesson the hard way. My fault. It could have gone way worse.
It still took me a few minutes to unscrew this knot in the mainsheet with frozen fingers and blinded by rain on my glasses.
By the time I fixed the main sheet, and untangled the jib sheets and got sailing again we had about four inches of water in the cockpit and another inch of water inside the boat. I cleaned that up, then sailed for a while longer. By then, we were both petty cold, Zach was shivering...so we dropped the main and sailed downhill via headsail right to the launch ramp. Zach headed to the van for some heat. I measured the outside temperature at this point and saw that it was 46 f. No wonder we were a tad cold.
A interesting first day for Zach. He said he enjoyed himself and would want to be going again. He also suggested how it might be more enjoyable on a nice sunny hot day.
Before long he will be hooked to this crazy past time.
