Sailing with Lee and Rita
The next Saturday was spent at home, watching for but not seeing the predicted scattered thunderstorms.
Sunday, June 3, 2001 was totally different from our first sail on the North River of Mobjack Bay with the exception of how far we got. I think that one marker doesn’t want us to pass it. Anyway, because the wind vane was busted off of the top of the mast and I realized also that the lights might not be working either after dropping the mast the previous weekend, the mast needed some fixing. We needed to get it down for a minute or two, and some extra hands to do it would certainly help. I was fine with asking our new neighbors; maybe after getting to know them, maybe just right away, but Rhonda invited her sister Rita and her hubby Lee, my favorite brother in law, to come out to the marina and work on repairing the boat. They could refuse an invitation to go sailing, you see, but not a call for help. So, that’s what we did.
Once again, bright and early in the afternoon we arrived at the marina. I am really getting to like the place. There were different groups of people this time, families doing more family type activities. A dog or two and some kids doing various non-constructive kid looking things. I noticed some boats I remembered were now gone away somewhere, and others were there that I hadn’t seen before. The boats are always interesting to me. Some are right off the rack, just as the designer and manufacturer intended them; and some show signs of makeshift workshop design, as their owners’ have fancied or managed to modify them. One or two may well have been born from scratch in somebody’s garage or shed. Those are my favorites but I like them all.
We pointed out an abandoned boat to Lee, knowing it would be taken as a joke. The manager said he would give it away, his slips were full and it was not paying rent. It has a double keel, the companionway hatches are gone and the whole thing looks like it’s been through a hundred terrible storms. It had been pulled up during really high tides and was sitting on its keels in the mud. Lee laughed, but he looked. We knew it might be adopted later by someone else, we thought of doing so ourselves but knew we didn’t really have time for all of the things we were doing already. It couldn’t hurt to give Lee a chance to get a head full of ideas. We had to try; it was like a duty.
The mast was much easier with twice as many hands. Lowering the mast to the dock was nothing at all with two of us on each end. The lights lit and the new wind vane popped right on without a fight. I only forgot three or five things, so it all went pretty smoothly. Up went the mast again in record time. One of our neighbors was also checking and changing an anchor light, but he was hoisting his son up to the top of the mast. I exchanged glances with the kid at the masthead, imagining our mutual envies obliterating each other in an invisible green flash between us, knowing we were both fully content with our own challenges at the moment.
Still –
Now Rita and Lee were off the hook; the lights worked and the wind thingie was on top of the big sail holder upper and pointing west real hard. So how about going out for a little ride around the river? Now, we knew they had to say yes because it would be real dumb to drive all the way out here, work on the boat, and then not go sailing. They thought about it for a few seconds and said yes. What’d I tell you?
It takes a long time to get ready to sail. The boat with the kid in the rigging is undergoing preparations and will be all day. Maybe much longer. There is another large boat just a friendly wave away, getting ready to go. The old skipper is measuring his time in weeks. Whisper is just a wisp of a thing compared to some of the others, but it still takes time to set up and go. Nobody said anything, but having passengers got me started thinking about it. Size, every size, is one of those compromises that boats are made of.
When we’d motored out to the river, we found out what the little wind vane had been trying to tell us. This was a little windier than the wind we learned in, but the waves were smaller. Far out! The main was tough to raise, and we really should have taken the hint and kept it reefed but we’d never done that and we weren’t sure our baggy old sail would roll up on the boom very well and didn’t really think it was that bad out and, well, we just didn’t think of it. Or, I could have just left the jib down. But, once the main was up, the jib went up and we shot off over the waves.
We were going great. We had some trouble pulling away from the lee shore at one point. It was getting disturbingly shallow beneath us where I thought we had some depth. We managed to get away. (I took another hard look at the chart later.) By then we were close to that marker that had haunted us just a few days before. The place was the same, but this time it was different. The water was roiled up in one to two foot waves with whitecaps. Gusts of wind were scooting us along on our side in the most remarkable ways. It is our dumb luck that Whisper is so well balanced, there was no fighting the tiller. The passengers, however, had had enough " 
fun". Around we went and back upstream, just as quick and easy as you could want. Except for the gusts rolling us over on our side now and then, spray wetting the sails and other small irregularities.
Another sailboat passed us going the other way. She was about our size, moving in a quite dignified and sedate way under a lone jib sail. Good idea, I thought, except I’m tacking upwind just now. We waved at one another. The quantity of time required for me to realize what I needed to do to make our ride more civilized had not yet elapsed from the first raising of the mainsail. It would not, in fact, elapse until around dinnertime. A good spot upwind of where I intended to stop sailing and start motoring in was quickly drawing near.
There was a bit of tacking and jibing and one elegant little spin at this point while transferring the helm before lowering the sails. Then the sails went down with a lot less trouble than they went up, it was still a fight. Starting the motor was a little difficult, but when we had finally transformed our mode of propulsion from sail to gas and headed downwind to the first marker it was like a storm had passed. We were all a little like people getting off of a roller coaster; ruffled, smiling, sighing, shaking our heads, laughing, sometimes talking and sometimes quiet.
We had only lost two hats. Docking went pretty smoothly, except we were backing in against the wind again. The kid was still up there at the masthead, ready to come down. We took Lee and Rita to dinner on the way home. We had a feast. Everybody laughed.
Forward to:
The Rest of June
Back to Mobjack Bay
