Another Weekend Early in the Season

And, hence, a bit chilly some of the time. Here she is in her slip; iit was taken Sunday morning when the wind was quite gentle, but it was still kind of chilly.

I went up to the lake on Friday afternoon. I didn't get as early a start as I had hoped, so it was evening before I arrived. I took the dinghy for a row, but didn't go very far upriver, given that the weather seemed iffy. Instead, I toured the marina, rowing up each lagoon, checking the boats, reading boat names, stuff like that. I had an idea for a new name for my boat: Rincewind. He's a wizard-in-training at the Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld novels. It manages to combine a semi-obscure literary reference with the word "wind" which is popular in sailboat names.


On Saturday, I went out sailing. It was a moderately windy day when I started by making the 10:30 am bridge opening. The wind picked up steadily while I was out there, though, so after about an hour it was blowing pretty good. As the picture below shows, we where moving well and heeled over pretty far.

In fact, the GPS said that we were going over 6 miles per hour at times, which is getting close to her hull speed of maybe 5.8 knots (I saw 6.3 mph on the GPS, which is about 5.4 knots.) Okay, so I know that doesn't sound very fast for most forms of transportation, but it isn't bad for a small sailboat. And it feels really great when you are heeled over, struggling to keep her on course against the strength of the wind, with spray leaping up and wetting your face. That feels faster than the numbers sound.

In fact this picture shows the truth of something that I have read in other accounts of sailing: pictures of waves never do them justice. They flatten out and look boring. What you can't see here are the waves and whitecaps. You can't feel the boat hit them. Odd, but a still picture doesn't really capture a dynamic experience, does it?

As the wind piped up, I had no doubts about the boat's ability to handle it. I did have some about my ability to handle it, however, especially by myself. The sailing was fine, but I wondered whether I would be able to get the sails down and the motor started in the wind and waves that I had. I finally decided to head back in, in case conditions deteriorated. Everything went just fine, however, so next time my strategy will be to take in a reef on both the jib and the mainsail to see how she handles under that sail configuration. Things should get a little less frantic.

Saturday evening I took another row and when pretty far up the river before coming back. Saturday evening was quiet, weatherwise, but sometime during the evening (at a guess, maybe2 or 3 am) the wind really piped up and we were bouncing around for several hours, during which I didn't get a lot of sleep. It wasn't terribly uncomfortable, but I was wondering what was going on with her and whether everything would hold. I would say around 4 am, things started to moderate a bit, and I ended up sleeping late (almost 7 am!). Sunday morning others commented on the amount of wind overnight and agreed that somehow the weather forecasts missed warning us of the front that would move through and have that effect.

The wind was still unusually high on Sunday morning when I walked downtown, around the waterfront park and out to the end of the jetty and back. By the time I finished breakfast, however, it was settling down and eventually became quite light. Turns out that I got really laxy about sailing, however, and worked on some small projects from the boat to-do list, with another short row, including taking the picture at the beginning of this post.

So that was the past weekend.