September 7, 2002

We didn’t get back to the water until Saturday, September 7, 2002. The weather was so incredibly hot this summer that staying outside for any amount of time was out of the question. A little shed we built in June just sat in the sun for two months without shingles on its roof while we hid indoors. There was so little rain that it didn’t matter. We did get to the boat a time or two to check the lines and bail out the very small amounts of rainwater that still gather in the back. The heat was too awful to stay, so we just drove around sightseeing and shopping just for the illusion of having gotten out and done something.

Finally a day came along that we thought we could handle, temperatures were supposed to stay below 90 for a change, plus light winds. I was impatient to go. I had the gas can and the ditch bag containing all the dire necessities and official papers required, already tossed into the pickup and was ready, ready, ready. Rhonda thought to pack a lunch and some other things like water and sunscreen so we wouldn’t die. Good thinking lets go. I had to make the sandwiches and make sure the cats and dog were in and out, respectively; okay lets go. I had to check that some stuff or another was packed in the pickup, and some more stuff we definitely don’t need and can’t possibly use, no, no, no, oh alright, it’s in the truck. Lets go. Finally, we went. Earlier than ever this time, we arrived at the boat just before noon.

The wind was light and variable from the East. If it held steady, we could whisp down to the lighthouse and back on flat calm water doing beam reaches all the way. Setting up the sails went relatively smoothly, for us, and this time we even had an anchor ready to go. More lines crisscrossing the deck all the time, but we don’t have to go ON deck now. That’s a fair trade, right? Strangely, the anchor line and the topping lift were both messed up and we never noticed. The anchor, if we dropped it, would have just dangled off of the jib sheet until we untangled it. We could have done this easily but it would have spoiled the moment if we had decided to drop anchor. The topping lift was loosely tied to the back rail the whole time we were sailing, right next to the main sheet so we didn’t notice. It was also attached to the boom, like it was supposed to be. This really must have restricted the normal operation of the sail. We never noticed it, apparently thinking that the wind being so light and unpredictable was the cause of our slow progress. The sea can do strange things to you.

We motored out to the North river, as usual. It was a very beautiful day, with puffy little clouds and there weren’t a lot of boats around this time, like we had the whole ocean to ourselves. The sails went up easily, love that deck organizer, and we spent a while playing with the little gusts of wind, catching them and losing them and pretty much getting nowhere. We kept the main hauled in fairly close knowing that we weren’t going to pay enough attention to prevent a gibe, concealing our little topping lift goof up quite effectively. We just set our sails for dinking around mindlessly on the water more than anything.

After about a half hour of this, we fired up the motor to head south to more open water, where the wind could reach down to us and we could get going to the lighthouse. About a mile more down the river we found a patch of breeze, tiny ripples marking where our free ride to the horizon started, and shut off the motor. The sails filled and we moved along. The only waves were the wakes of other boats, the air was very clear. We could see the lighthouse on the horizon through our tiny telescope a little over eight miles away. We could sail straight there, but slowly. It was a truly beautiful day to go on a lazy sailing trip. About this time we noticed that we had forgotten to bring our lunch.

I had the strange sensation of being both in heaven and in hell at the same time as we sailed lazily along in this mildly inaccessible paradise debating at length exactly who was a knucklehead and exactly who was a stupid jerk. While discussing the correct and equitable distribution of blame for this occasion, we slowly and reluctantly turned our enchanted craft around to help lessen the distance between ourselves and our increasingly late mid afternoon meal. It was funny and it was sad. If we hadn’t been getting just a little bit sunburned, having been hiding from the sun for so long, there wouldn’t have been any other good reason at all to go back just then. Fortunately, we were turning just a little red, yeah, around the extremities. Don’t want to overdo it, dear. We’ll just head back a little sooner, got to take care of ourselves. Good idea, okay.

We proceeded to sail back up the river. The day marker we buzzed past seemingly minutes before was really far away, somehow, and it took longer to get back to it than I imagined it would. No problem, just interesting. Still very pleasant sailing, just not the way we wanted to go. That’s how sailing is.

Soon we came back to that day marker that we always had trouble with, sticking out in the middle of the river. While debating the pros and cons of leaving the green marker on our starboard in order to avoid a motorboat, which was inconveniently anchored right in our way, that is, in the navigable channel, we compromised by agreeing to leave the marker on our port side, where we would not run aground, and to passing near the boat but also to turn the motor back on. Motor boaters get a little nervous around sailboats, even though sailboats move so slowly. Probably because sail boaters have to work a little more at it to operate their craft, and their craft rarely go straight toward where they’re heading, presenting the illusion of not being in control. They get even more nervous if you are moving rapidly around in your boat looking nervous, quarreling among yourselves, or sailing straight toward them. Sail boaters are more tolerant of these things in other sailboats, understanding the reasons behind them. Still, we cut our motor-spoiled brethren a little extra slack and try not to alarm them too much when we pass.

We had gobs of gas because we hadn’t been using it for so long, and we needed to get rid of it anyway. Things were working out pretty good after all. The jib sail came right down with my, I don’t know what else to call it, antihalyard, adding it’s share of clutter to the deck but paying its way admirably. The mainsail flopped down and tied up without a struggle. That’s when I noticed the topping lift foolishly clinging to the wrong part of the boat, now that it was too late to improve our performance by fixing it. We also detected and fixed the anchor rode problem, unhooking it from the inboard side of the jib sheet. In fact, now that we were a motorboat ourselves, we were alert to a lot of things that we hadn’t noticed before. Not wishing to waste any of her excess awareness, Rhonda got her long handled fish net out and proceeded to try to nab some of the fishes we were seeing in our fish finder-depth meter. Fortunately they were all at least three times deeper than the length of the handle on her little net. She did, however, catch some interesting little live round things that she quickly released again. While she was doing that, I was studying the clouds. We had a bank of clouds in the east slowly approaching and, wouldn’t you know it, a nice steady wind now that we were buzzing along by motor. The clouds weren’t dangerous looking then, but they turned out later to be a little dark and scary when passing overhead.

Here was the plan. We would tie up real quick leaving the boat ready to go and, trusting our neighbors, drive off somewhere to get some food and hit the local boating goods store, then come back and sail some more. We did all of those things except for the very last item. The boating goods store depleted us of considerable energy, I think, and when we got back to the boat under those dark and slightly scary looking clouds from the east, well, you know, home was looking like a good place to be again.

We had a pretty good time just packing up, anyway. The various items we need to take care of are apparently becoming trained to do what they need to do by themselves, and the boat practically sorted itself out and tucked itself in bed. We got a replacement for the hat and the boat hook we recently lost and put those in their places. I tried rolling up the jib sail for a change instead of folding it to see if it’s quicker when stashing and deploying. I would say it is so; you can certainly roll one up in less space and less time than fold one. The end result is a little more bulky, I think, but we have space below. Even with that major irregularity, our entire kit of boating luggage was packed and sitting on the dock waiting for us to carry them off before we knew it. For all of the goofy things we did it turned out to be a pretty good trip, just a little shorter than we could have wished.

Go on to End of 2002