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I took Sea Puppy out by myself. Winds 15 to 20 gusting to 23 or so. Seas about 1 ft.. what a blast.. on a beam with half the jib reefed and two reefs in the main I was still doing 7 knots. Measured the wind with the anemometer that Miriam gave me for christmas 🙂 I wasn’t trying to push it hard there for I reefed fairly early. Also with sustained gusts that were runing 7 to 10 knots over average wind speed I reefed more for the gusts than the sustained winds.
As always when by myself I ran the jacklines and clipped in if out of the cockpit. Mostly it was a pretty slow day. I just enjoyed the clear blue skys and nice winds.
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Took Sea Puppy out by myself today… calm conditions.. maybe 8 knots of wind and less that 1 ft of seas… almost flat.
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feb 24 2007 video
I took Sea Puppy out today and sailed about 6 miles down the coast and back. Conditions were about 9 to 10 knots of wind and 1 ft seas. Wind from the S/SE and seas from the N/NE. Ben took out Winds of Freedom and Angela had Valkyr out also. Needless to say Ben walked away from Angela and I as if we were standing still. A beneteau First 36.7 is a fast boat points like a banshee. It was unreal watching him pointing higher and going much faster than either of us could go. It almost looked like he was sailing in much different wind than us. On the other hand Valkyr and Sea Puppy amazingly seem to in that wind range have very similar performance. Valkyr is a Down East 38 so she has a much longer waterline and with the cutter rig a lot of sail area, on the other hand she is a heavy cruising boat. Upwind I can almost hang with her. I can point higher than she can but at a cost of about a 1/4 knot of speed compared to her. On the same heading upwind I was maintaining speed as long as I was hand steering. Using the autopilot slowed me down enough that she would creep ahead. ( the auto pilot was doing a lot of work correcting the course because of the seas being following seas. I could adjust for this better than the autopilot.) On the way back in running down wind Sea Puppy just zipped home. We walked away from Valkyr at a steady clip. The weight on Valkyr really started to count against her as apparent wind dropped off downwind.
Not much wind to speak of today and the air temp was around 50 degrees. I wasn’t real sure it was worth going out sailing but sometimes you just need to get on the water. Lee volunteered to go with me so off we went. 🙂 well after we get the engine started “off we went”. I’m getting really tired of outboards.. or at least mine.. I haven’t had many of them and the ones I have had were someone else’s for a quite a few years before I got them, so maybe a new one would be more reliable. I have my doubts though. I don’t they like me in general. Always stopping just when you need them or not starting when you want them to start. After about 40 minutes of fiddling and playing with it I finally got outboad started. Squirt of carb cleaner into the cylinder and put the spark plugs back in and it started right up on the first pull. 🙂 so I cheated, but it worked.
I was feeling pretty anti-social yesterday and it having been a while since I had gotten out sailing, decided to take Sea Puppy out by myself. It was nice to just go sailing alone. Serious recharge the batteries time for me. It was a gorgeous day and though alone on the boat I did get over near Walkabout to get a few pictures of her for Jay.
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I got a few pictures of the water and clouds that day that I thought were pretty cool also
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Today was one of those days where you just needed to get away and get some water time.. I went down to the boat and cleaned a bit and then got Patty and Jeff to go out with me.. we didn’t even go sailing just took the fishing poles and motored up and down the waterway for a few hours fishing. Not a single bite did we get but that wasn’t the point.. I can’t say how relaxing it was to just be out there floating on the water having left all the current crop of problems at the dock.
When we got back I closed the boat up and went to get a bite to eat at a new place in the new sporting complex in Little River. I had previously met two sisters that work there and they had invited me to check it out. I had just sat down to eat a quiet meal with them when one of my current crop of problems called me and then walked in and sat down at the table in the middle of my meal.
I have since september been involved in a business deal with a friend providing IT knowledge to him and building a website and other stuff for him. Never do business with friends!! It can lead to losing them as a friend.
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Solo on Sea Puppy again. I agreed to meet Patty on Pirate Girl so that we could get some pictures of each others boats on the water. 🙂 Patty took some great pictures of me being a goof on Sea Puppy
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I got a few pictures of Pirate Girl also for Patty
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It was a race day today but only me and Ben showed up to race. Ben took out his new boat, Winds of Freedom, a Beneteau F36.7. Well regardless of the rest of the slackers in the sailing club we went out. Ben with his 6 or 7 crew persons and me all by my lonesome. I tried to convince him to loan me some crew but he’s as hard hearted a pirate as ever lived 🙂
He went and topped off fuel or some such and I headed out for the Inlet. I hung out till he got there and then we headed for the Sherman, a wreck about 6 miles offshore.
I went out by myself today… It was a race day on the club scheadule but me and Patty are the only ones that showed up to the captains meeting. Oh well.. we both went out and since we had two boats we tried to see who could go faster 🙂 so I guess we raced. 🙂 there is some argument as to wether she won once and I won once or wether we raced in seperate divisions (racing and cruising) so both won. 🙂 I think since her PHRF is 140 or so that she is in racing and I’m in crusing at 194 or so 🙂
We had a great time. With north winds around 15 gusting to maybe 20 and 3 ft seas it was a beautifull blue sky day. After sailing we went back and tied up at Poo’s and got a bite to eat. Mostly because there was only 3.8 ft of water in Pattys marina and she had to wait for the tide to come back in a bit before she could get into her slip.
We slept like the dead through saturday night, even the sound of the band from the deck above the docks as they late into the night didn’t keep us awake. Lack of sleep from the friday nightgale and a long day racing saturday left us exhausted. While many partied late into the night after the race, most of us that had been there for friday night’s storm made an early night of it saturday. In contrast to friday night the water and wind saturday night was calm to the point of flat with the boat not moving at all through the night other than to rock to the wake of the rare vessal that passed by on the inland waterway just yards away.
Sunday morning dawned bright and clear with blue skies and a strong chill breeze. Though slow to get up and moving just about everyone was ready to leave and had cast off the docks by 9am. Orrin on La’ Bon Vie was towing Angela on Valkyr down the waterway and back to Little River. Pirate Girl (Patty) and Winds of Freedom (Ben) also took the waterway back to Little River.
I didn’t think we were going to get to race. The wind was blowing dead on our stern as we sat in our slip at a steady 25 kts with gusts into the low 30s. We had a pole dead behind us that we needed to slide sideways around (about 9 feet to starboard to clear it before we could then back out into the channel).
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With only a 4 hp outboard I wasn’t sure it was up to controlling us in a sideways slide and then backing against the wind and fetch that was coming at our stern. With all of us on the boat (Jay and Miriam and Me) we did a couple of test runs while still tied to the dock. Each time I was able to take the slack out of the docklines from where we were being pushed into the slip by the wind and waves. So with just a few minutes before our start in the race I made the decision to give it a try. We used a line from the port stern cleat to the piling behind us on starboard for some extra security, just in case we had a problem. However it all went very smooth.. With the poor engine going full out we slowly moved sideways around the pole behind us and then out into the channel. 🙂 I almost didn’t give it enough room before going into forward. With the wind pushing us back at the docks I thought for a moment that it was going to push us into them before I got turned away. The nice thing about my outboard is that I can turn it as well as the tiller and it gives me an increadably tight turning radius. I used it 🙂
It continually amazes me how maneuverable Sea Puppy is and how little power she needs to move. She realistically weighs in with us on board with fuel, water, batteries, engine etc.. at about 4000lbs. Her dry weight just the boat with no stores, fuel etc.. on her is around 3300 lbs. a whopping 900 more than the factory specks show. Every 235 owner I have heard of that has weighed their boat has reported similar weights. I would like to move up to a 6hp engine though just to have a little more margin in power.
You have to wonder about people that sail sometimes. I mean the forcast was for rain and 20 knots all day friday. Thirty to fifty knots gale force winds that night. Mid twenty knots saturday and twenties on Sunday.
So what do I and 5 other boats do Friday? head up the waterway from Little River Inlet to Cape Fear River via the Intracoastal Waterway friday morning. 3 of the boats had dogers and or bimini’s but a couple of us didn’t have anything but foul weather gear. The forcast was right.. It rained, it poured, it blew, and we motored on and on through it.
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