Sailing with my parents, Wednesday, May 14, 2003
I took a week off from work to hang out with my folks from Arkansas, who decided to drop by for a few days. They hadn’t seen our new house, or met most of our current dogs and cats yet. We set up a little guest room for them and everybody had a good time. One of the things they wanted to do was go sailing on our boat, which we did as soon as the stormy weather that followed them cross-country to Virginia allowed.
In the middle of a week of unsettled weather we happened to catch a couple of nearly perfect hours for sailing. The wind was south at eight to ten knots the whole time. We tacked upwind to the marker midway down the river, hove-to for a snack, and made a lazy run back; with a dark cloud looming behind us for dramatic effect. My mom was delighted with how quiet it was, and my dad got a few turns steering which he seemed to enjoy a lot. We ran aground on the way out while trying to get a closer look at one shore; I was on the tiller at the time. The bottom went from 15 feet to 5 feet very abruptly when I wasn’t looking, which was pretty often with a full boat. The swing keel made escape easy; just a couple of minutes of tour guide talk while Whisper went ahead and found its own way back to the deep water; boat trying to make a good impression, I guess. Well, it worked.
Only one thing was slightly off-perfect that day; the motor didn’t "squirt". Its sudden failure to circulate the usual amount of coolant water was not a little discomforting. I tried to keep the running time to a minimum. ASAP later, we spoke to our outboard mechanic. He suggested we try clearing the output nozzle for the water, since stuff gets stuck there frequently, and if that doesn’t work to bring it back to him. I hope that works (It worked!) because that thing is a real beast to wrestle onto and off of the back bracket.
Our lack of extraordinary difficulties this year, so far, is a little peculiar even taking into consideration the fair weather. I’m thinking that we might have finally gotten to the point where we are actually capable of sailing, not just aspiring to it, or getting away with it. This makes these later stories a little dull, I know, and I feel real bad about it so we are working on a solution to the situation. After my folks took off for home, we went marina shopping.
Rhonda is getting eager for the wide open spaces of the big bay, I guess, she found a place close to much wider expanses of water. She pointed out to me that the new place she has in mind is less expensive. I pointed out to her that the new place is a few miles closer to the New Point Comfort lighthouse, our favorite sailing destination that we have yet to make it to. We were both pleasantly surprised to hear each other’s news. If we change to this new place it will be sometime next August, so there’s time to decide.
We can sail the boat straight to the new place easy enough, we have sailed that distance round trip before; all we have to do is forget to turn around in the middle of the voyage. There’s a big shoal with a little gap in it right in everybody’s way on the west side of the mouth of Mobjack Bay, after that we just go a little further west up the York River, and there we are. It will help if we time our meeting with the shoal to coincide with high tide, and it will help even more if we get a north or east wind for the day. That may be asking a lot.
More adventures to come. 
6. Mobjack Bay, 2003
