Memorial Day Weekend, 2002
Saturday, May 25, 2002. The wind was absolutely perfect, out of the North East and then turning East later, ten knots, balmy day. From our slip to the lighthouse and back would be an all-day beam-reach dream; offshore breeze, perfect. We were ready to go. We were going. We couldn’t go.
It all started unraveling when I came back from getting gas and a fast food breakfast. My cat, who was fine when I left, had gotten beat up somehow by some beast in the woods. He was hunkered on the front porch; filthy, stinking, bleeding, drooling, panting, and wide-eyed. He wanted inside right now. Poor guy, he was just out for his morning walk in the underbrush and got mugged. We packed him up and took him to the vet, who could see he was pretty badly shaken up, but didn’t find much physically wrong with him except dirt and a cut lip. We got some pills for him and brought him home. He had pretty much recovered back to his old self by Monday, but we’re still looking for his collar and trying to reason out what happened. Most likely a raccoon, from what we can puzzle out.
Oh yeah, back to Saturday; with all of that pretty much wrapped up as well as it could be, it was now mid morning and we were still able to get a couple of errands done and go sailing. Here we go. Oh, no, we don’t. Now we find out that we need to sign for a young relative’s car loan today instead of tomorrow. Something came up, who cares what. It’s her birthday, what can we do? We can hurry! We delete some stuff off of our list of early morning errands. It doesn’t help. It’s an hour drive to the dealership, then it’s nearly three hours putting a crummy signature on a stupid piece of paper. I’m watching a giant flag flapping our wind away while I jawbone with my brother in law in the parking lot, doing my best to look unsavory so they will want to hurry us out of there. It’s getting later and I also want lunch, I want to know what happened to my cat, I wish the sociopath disk jockeys in the nearby tent full of loudspeakers could find something to play that had a little music in it. I can’t look unsavory enough; I’m too old. I’m sure car salesmen are immune anyway.
By early afternoon, we had given up on sailing and I was as bummed out as any teenager could have been. Never too old for some things, I guess. The rest of the day was completely wasted on useful, constructive things.
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Sunday was merciful and allowed us to get to the boat. I arrived full of mistrust and suspicion. Well, okay, I smiled a little. The weather held but the wind was out of the south. We did pretty good tacking against the wind, we were really getting the hang of it. Not a chance in heck that we would make it to the lighthouse today but at least we made it to the boat. The waves were small and the air was pleasant. We apparently just needed to fight with something because we fought our way to the mouth of the North river when we didn’t really need to. We were racing the other boats, whether they knew it or not, and we were winning. Okay, life is good again.
I discovered something interesting. When we tack we normally lose most of our speed and then keep turning all the way to a beam reach in spite of how we steer it. We have to pick up speed before resuming our close reach. I discovered that if I let the mainsheet out in the turn, I could settle right into a close reach without having to recover lost speed first. Just ease the main back in as we speed up. I had tried easing the jib to do this, but easing out the main seems to work much better. It strikes me as strange because easing the jib should relieve lee helm, easing the main should make it worse. Apparently it adds speed much faster and keeps the boat more upright so we get to keep rudder control and glide right away from those turns. I would have never thought of it, I had to learn by doing. But that’s something fun to think about while not sailing. Never mind it now, we were going really great as long as we paid attention, which is always going to be our weakest point.
Some of our neighbors were sailing their larger boat under main only, tacking lazily upwind, a bit slower than we were going. They were just too relaxed and enjoying themselves too much. Apparently they didn’t have a foresail of any kind that day. It was going to take a lot of serious sailing for us to get that relaxed. Well, we were on our way. We left them far behind.
There were quite a lot of boats out that day, enough that we had to recall some rules of the road. Even so, we were pretty often about a quarter of a mile from the nearest human being.
About the time we made it to the marker at the mouth of the North river, Rhonda pooped out and went below for a nap. The waves were still no more than a foot, really nice, I lowered and tied up the mainsail and headed back under jib alone. It was a long, quiet ride back. After a while I decided maybe I should have kept the mainsail up but didn’t want to disturb her with my untying it. I would have certainly disturbed her with the sailing I could have done under both sails. It was just as well. I dodged patches of sea grass to amuse myself. She snoozed for nearly an hour. I started the motor and lowered the jib a while sooner than I needed to. It was great to be able to single hand it. We had a little further to motor than usual but we were both really tired by then. On the way back I adjusted the fuel mix to run a little lean, obeying some hunches and whims, then I forgot I did that.
While docking, the motor died. We started to drift downwind, away from the dock toward a grassy shore a few hundred feet away and gaining speed in a fairly steady wind. Well, I finally got the motor again and we proceeded to retrace our drift away from the dock. When we slowed down the motor died again. I was stunned, I yanked on the cord for a while but it wouldn’t restart. Okay, time for the anchor. First time anchoring in our boat. Too bad I forgot to have fun just then, really a shame, but I was trying to get the boat docked and having a lot of strange problems. I finally remembered the fuel mix and turned it back where it was before and fired up the motor after a few good yanks, getting tired and a little annoyed. Rhonda got to pull in the anchor, since she doesn’t motor backwards very skillfully, while I raced the motor going back to the dock. There were still a few more boats about than I was used to seeing so I was a little more careful than usual about behaving well in traffic. I missed the interesting gunk she pulled up with the anchor because I was too busy smiling and waving at the boat traffic to reassure them we were friendly and cursing and snarling at the motor to encourage it to keep going. We were going to make it.
Rhonda’s hat then fell in the water. I said I’d buy her another one but somehow that wasn’t good enough. There was no way I was going to trust that outboard just yet in the wind and boat traffic just for a hat. The hat slipped my mind about half a dozen times in the next hour, or however many times I was reminded of it, but I forgot about it all over again every single time, because we were really busy with tying up, stowing sails, unloading the boat, and trying to figure out how to arrange the dock lines better. Rhonda didn’t like the new slip. I was convincing myself that the fuel mix was the only problem with the motor, I was still wondering what happened to my cat, I was trying to forget about yesterday, I was trying to explain that all the docks really are just as high as this one, it’s just a really, really low tide. I was wearing out. Maybe I should have played bumper-cars with the other boats and gone out to the hat and got it? - No. No way.
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We bent our expensive telescoping boat hook during the emergency anchoring, and the camera finally died from sitting in the boat all week; it had been a tough camera, survivor of much misuse. I thought the boat hook would last much longer than it did, though. I will have to remember to buy a new hat for Rhonda, and it better be a good one. We brought the tiller home because it was beginning to crack. We brought the boat hook home to show off to our friends.
We will also have to do a lot more sailing; we are way too stressed out and wound up.
John
Go on to - A September day
