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The banquet was nice this year.. we didn’t do much business as a lot of people didn’t make it, but we had good food and some great company. I took a few pictures so without much ado here are a few of them.. for anyone that wants to see them all just click on this link here . The whole gang!!! Susan and Ben 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 with Patty and Hans on Pirate Girl today.. Pirate Girl really is just a slightly bigger Sea Puppy.. It’s like sailing a 33 ft dingy.. A very nice dingy I will grant you 🙂 We beam reached out from the inlet for about 5 miles and then back. For most of that time the boat was so balanced that you didn’t have to touch the helm but once every few minutes. It was a nice mellow sail with plenty of time for talking and just watching the water slide by. Patty dropped her second radio in the water yesterday. I put fins and a mask on and went looking for it today but it must be one of the lighter ones that the current could drag off. She dropped it in about 9 ft of water so it should have been right there. I spent about 10 minutes doing sweeps under her boat and the dock but did not find it. At about 10 minutes in the water it went from burning cold to starting to feel warmer 🙂 so I knew my time in the water was up. Full on hypothermia is not a good thing to get so i popped out and got dry and then slugged back a big mug of hot apple cider. I was right as rain in just a couple minutes after that. I also put one of those hand warmers in my shoe, that helped my body warm back up also. I got to go out on Jay’s Jenneau 43 “Walkabout” today.. What a sweet boat!! We had about 2 1/2 foot swells with 8 to 12 kts of wind and she pretty much sailed half to a little better than half of apparent wind speed through that range. Walkabout is probably one of the largest sailboats I’ve sailed on to date and the motion is quite a bit different. A much slower motion. Though I didn’t get green, I could feel the potential for it early on in the day. After a while I shook it and felt fine though. After a rocky start getting out of the slip 🙂 ( there was a really wicked current and wind both blowing Pirate Girl torward the dock and pilings where she ties up.) we motored out to the inlet and had a nice sail. No crazyness just smooth sailing. We had a beam reach on a heading of 180 out of the inlet and ran out about 6nm before turning around and beam reaching back in. Coming back into the dock we had current and wind pushing us around but Patty backed us in perfectly the first time. Nice job!! Went out on Angela’s Valkyr (a cutter rigged Down East 38) yesterday. In winds from 8 knots to about 14 knots she seemed to hit about half of apparent wind speed. Seas were running from 2.5 to maybe 3 feet and she rode over them with no problem and was dry both in the cockpit and up on the bow. Sail handling on Valkyr wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. the main once it was up a few feet went up hand over hand as fast as I could pull it up. The stay sail went up even easier.. The jib was the only sail that didn’t set real easy. It still has a lot of resistance to unfurling off the roller furling. It went on easier than coming off and even going on wasn’t as easy as I think it should be. Here are some images of it installed on starboard. 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. 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). 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 🙂 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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