Sunday, May 19, 2002
In spite of all the chaos we are sorting through these days, we were able to steal an afternoon to go sailing. We had a vigorous cold front pass through the previous day bringing rain, wind, clouds, plummeting temperatures and so forth. Today we had some brisk north breezes and cool temperatures. All the way to the dock we listened to the weather radio robot telling us of 15 to 20 knot winds and 3-foot waves and small craft advisories in some areas. The temperature was in the lower sixties, skies partly cloudy.
Rhonda went to the office at the marina to renew our lease of the slip for another year while I lugged the heavier stuff out to the boat. On the way I passed a thirty-something-foot motor-sailor moored in a temporary spot on the dock, someone was working in the back and facing the other way, I didn’t have much breath at the moment for a friendly greeting or energy to spare for a second look, but I made it all the way to the boat without sitting my stuff down. I had waited long enough. I was ready to go. I was going. When Rhonda got to the boat I had just about got everything I was carrying stowed away and the boom and mainsail halfway set up. Pretty good, I thought. She had two news items for me.
First, she had rented the spot across from us, where the live-aboards had been last fall. They had taken off to some southern state to buy a bigger boat and their slip had been vacant. Now it was ours. This was fine with me because it was much easier to get in and out from there and the boat would be facing west, so the shade from our pop-top in the afternoon would work better. Good move. The second thing she had to say was that those same old neighbors were back again with their new boat.
I can always depend on Rhonda to detect the presence of other human beings in my surroundings and pick out the nice ones. I do notice people myself, in my own way, just so I don’t trip over them; Rhonda stops and becomes old pals with everybody. I think this has made a nice little addendum to our marriage contract, mostly. We went back down the dock to say hello. I was a little surprised to find that it was the very boat I had failed to grunt a cheery hello at earlier due to my heavy load and no eye contact. Wow, it was a wonderful upgrade, brought all the way back up from Florida over the winter. They had just happened to be here renting a new slip today. They were not a little disappointed that after all the hundreds of miles they had come, they weren’t going to make it that last hundred yards to their old home at the north dock where their friends were. The marina owner had some peculiar ideas about where he wanted live-aboards to be. We were disappointed too because we liked having them around, it made the place more like a neighborhood and less like a parking lot. The south dock has bigger slips, I think, and they would probably need the extra space because their new boat was a little beamy even for it’s length. I was sure they would make themselves welcome wherever they docked, and not just because they had a beautiful boat.
Alrighty, then, back to our boat. It took us over an hour from arriving until we were ready to go. We started out struggling for a couple of hours and then taking off, but we had it down to about 45 minutes late last fall. All our new stuff made for a slightly different setup routine; the sail slides and topping lift, the do-it-myself jib “antihalyard”, and Rhonda was also little immobile today. The cool air was slowing her down a little. It was all a little more time consuming but I wasn’t complaining. The wind was not so bad as we feared; it even died away entirely now and then, so we were less worried about that. It was nice to be able to pull the jib up and pull it back down again from the cockpit, so that’s what I did, right there tied up in the slip. I’d done this before but I was up at the mast then, and I had to pull the jib down hand over hand. It’s not something you see people do much, probably for good reasons. This time I was in the cockpit for the whole operation. Rhonda thought maybe I shouldn’t be doing that. She had no idea how much I was restraining myself. I could have raised both sails, but I didn’t.
Our marina is up a creek, which connects to a bigger creek, which connects to the North River, (creek and river beds all below sea level now). Anyway, we got away from the marina and the little creek, and raised the jib sail in the big creek for a downwind pull to the North River. The very first time we were out we had raised both sails at about that spot but afterward decided we were better off waiting because we couldn’t lower our sails very easily if we needed to, so we got in the habit of motoring all the way to the north river. This time was going to be different, by golly, and this was the time for it to start being different. No more waiting, up went the jib, down went the throttle, and we were sailing.
After all of the weeks I waited impatiently to get back sailing, and all the work I put in hauling stuff onto the boat and getting it set and going, it was finally simply strange to settle down to the glacial pace of sailing in a light breeze. Rhonda was a little nervous about having any sails up before we got to open water and about having only the jib up at that; this was not the usual practice on our little boat. No, it isn’t, I agreed; why do you think I’ve been hopping with excitement about sailing again? We can control our sails so much better than before, now we can do things we never could before. Now we can do THIS!
Our jib was pulling us along at about 1 knot, the motor was idling, just in case. We slouched along going down wind for a few hundred yards. After reaching the North river and turning off the motor I attempted to head into the wind just long enough to raise the main sail. It was a little sloppy but it worked, the slides made it possible. I was ecstatic. Rhonda was getting a little chilly. Why aren’t there any other sailboats out? She asked. Really? I looked around. We had the whole ocean to ourselves! This was just getting better and better. I fetched her a hat and we went up the river instead of down the river for a change. The wind was so unsteady I figured we only had enough wind and time for exploring something close by.
The north end of the North river is a fairly big dogleg of water by itself. We approached it once before but the water depth became so shallow that we decided to do something else and turned back. The bottom crept up toward us this time, too, but it went right back down again. We just had to be brave. There was a wondrous halo around the sun, and scattered low clouds, and an iffy wind that ranged from zero to maybe fifteen knots but mostly hung around the middle of that range. We went up a little way, I don’t know how far, and turned around and headed back. Rhonda gave me two very long turns at the tiller and did some sailing herself between. We passed the time pleasantly with a lot of old fashioned sightseeing and other small talk, and a little casual quarreling about avoiding crab pots, trimming the sails and reading the wind vane. She was not doing very well in the cool air and she went below after a while to get out of the wind, leaving me to stow the sails and start the motor. She’s so good to me. After I tacked up to our marker I brought down the sails, which went even quicker than starting the outboard. It was all just plain beautiful, except that we were going back in.
Tying up in our new slip took some doing. We were starting with our old mooring lines and nothing was pre-fastened to anything. We are at least one mooring line short now and three of them are really too heavy a line for our cleats. After about twenty minutes of untying and retying lines we got tired and decided to take our chances, besides Rhonda just kind of melted on the dock and we had to take off anyway. (She’s okay; she just needed a cheeseburger sub in a warm restaurant.) I hope I can get new lines to the boat before something drifts away. We usually hang out for a while just to make sure nothing is forgotten and the boat is tied up right. Actually, the boat is probably just fine, too. Okay, everything is just fine.
We managed to misplace one windbreaker and one camera on this trip; both are probably on the boat. We also need new docking lines.
Go on to - Memorial Day Weekend
