15 Knots From the North

Finally got the kids out for a good sail today. Last two attempts were plagued by heat and lack of wind. It's tough to be spontaneous with kids. When it's just me, if the weather's nice and I want to sail, I go. A couple weeks ago I left the house for a lunch meeting without any thought of going sailing. On the drive over the bridge to Tampa I realized how nice it was and instead of going home from lunch, I went to the boat. I keep a change of clothes on the boat for just such an emergency. Kids have a schedule to work around and require lots of prep and extra gear.

But yesterday's forecast was calling for wind today and I was determined to get the kids out for more than just motoring around. We recovered well enough last time. After getting out to the channel and seeing it was dead calm (and hot), we putted back to the basin and dropped the hook for lunch. It was my first anchoring operation and it went off without a hitch. Since I don't have a reverse with which to set the hook, I dropped it off the stern with a little way on, set it with our momentum, and then walked it forward. Not that I even needed it to set given the light breeze (of which there seemed to be more of in the basin than in the bay). Eli managed to drop a non-critical but annoyingly bouyant piece of equipment overboard and in addition to the first successful anchoring operation we also executed our first succesfully object recovery operation. Lunch was pleasant enough although I didn't know at the time that I would be violently ill within a matter of hours.

So we trucked them down to the boat this morning after breakfast and were probably pushing away from the dock by 10:30am. Wind was out of the north which is real convenient for raising the main right out of the marina and sailing down the channel. T took her time getting the main up, but we managed to avoid disturbing the birds watching curiously from the shoal. Sometimes you can just tell that water is shallow even if you can't see the bottom. Birds standing in the water 10 yards in front of the boat is usually a good indicator.

Forecast was for 15 knots so I decided to go main-only. I don't have roller furling so getting the genoa rigged and unrigged is a hassle. I also wanted to keep boat operation simple and well-controlled for the kids' sakes. We had every bit of that 15 with gusts in the 20's and a nice chop to go with it.

Eli likes to tie knots and play other "tricks". It generally isn't a problem at home (except the time he tied up his sister), and I tend to encourage him to practice knots, but the boat is a different story. We've had problems on past excursions with the mainsheet mysteriously getting tied to the lifelines and a very effective stopper knot finding its way into a halyard. Today's trick was a padlock hanging from a bungee cord in the companionway. When we got out of the lee of the breakwater poor Aaron got two good smacks in the head from the swinging padlock before he had the sense to move.

We had a nice beam reach out to a range marker, turned around it, and then close reached back home. The wind backed some (or, more likely, I neglected to account for apparent wind angle on that beam reach), and we had to sail a little closer to the wind than I had planned for the leg home. The angle to the chop was much more comfortable, but we took a little spray and I had to dump the main a couple times to keep her on her feet.



We got back to the dock right at noon and I executed another flawless docking manuever. I have yet to make a fool out of myself while docking, which was my greatest fear when first starting to take the boat out, though I did come close the time I made one of my flawless manuevers into the wrong slip. T had a little smackerel of something for the kids to munch on while I got the boat cleaned up, then we headed home for a congratulatory beer and some big fresh air naps.

All in all it was a great day. The kids were less sure about this sailing business when you actually added wind into the equation. Sarah was scared and wanted to be in somebody's lap. The boys raised a general whine about being seasick. I think seasickness is at least 50% psychological and we're trying to nip it as best we can. I'm actually chagrined that they know the term at all, but when you've got a 4-year-old that understands the concepts of planetary motion, timezones, tides, magnetic fields, and how a ship floats, limiting knowledge can be difficult. They were all about the hard-boiled eggs back at the dock, so I don't think they really were.

I'm working on getting a moderately priced digital camera that I can keep with my boat stuff and have more readily available for taking pictures. Nevermind. Just bought this one.

Forecast for tomorrow: 15 knots from the North.