Sunday, May 5, 2002

Once again, we had no time to sail. There are amazing amounts of things to do these days. We got out to the boat late in the afternoon and we put on the rudder, reinstalled the battery, popped open the top, and hung about the dock for a while. There was practically no wind and the clouds were acting kind of suspicious, anyway. Sure they were. Our fellow dock loiterers were good company. It was a great day to tinker on boats.

Our pop-up top stuck a little but nothing worth worrying about. Ever since Rhonda painted the underside of the companionway hatch the rest of the underside of the pop-top looks kind of drab and now we need to paint it, too. (I warned her to take it easy with that, that, that paint stuff.) More seriously, the failure of the automatic battery charger to finish a charge cycle on our year-old battery gnaws occasionally on my mind. We put practically no load on it, but may eventually need an anchor light for a night, you can never tell. The fish finder, which serves as our depth finder, still works fine. Once in a while you can see a fish for a moment in the five to eight feet of water beneath the boat. That’s fun.

The rudder now has brand new aluminum plates holding it together where it hinges in the middle. Some day we will use the kick-up feature, but every single time we sail I will now know that the rudder isn’t on the verge of snapping in two any more. This is a good thing. The old, crumbly plates should be kept as a memento, but they continue to flake apart so constantly that I am reluctant to do much except throw them away. Too bad, they would have made a particularly memorable addition to our forgotten mountains of totally useless junk.

I worked on rigging up a jib sail puller downer, (downhaul? antihalyard?) and ran into some problems with the tiny block that should go close to the tack of the jib. Our boat is designed for just so much rigging, and no more, absolutely no more. I really don’t want to drill additional holes in the deck, especially where I can’t get to the underside very easily. We think we finally managed a workable setup, putting the little block on the jib’s pendant itself, but will have to try it out in real life to know for sure. So a small line can now go from the end of the jib halyard, down along the forestay, in and out a time or two between the hanks, through that little pulley and then back to the cockpit. Pull the jib halyard, and up goes the jib. Pull on the antihalyard, and down comes the jib. Isn’t science wonderful?

If that works it will be great, because it’s tough working out there on the pointy end of our little deck when the big waves are bouncing you around and the wind is flogging the sail around your head. Not to mention very slow, a little dangerous, and kind of embarrassing when other boats have to dodge you while you get your boat back in control. I am also looking forward to trying some downwind sailing under the jib only, now that I can douse or raise either sail right quickly. Those long windy downwind runs with the main sail up just because we might need it kind of make me nervous. Now we can scoot lazily along without worrying about the boom trying to brain somebody at random moments.

With the topping lift, and the sail slides, and the various halyards leading to the cockpit, I look forward to our sailing being much easier and safer this year. If everything works, we should be able to raise and lower the mainsail literally with one hand, which took four hands and a trip to the mast before, and do it much quicker.  We should now be able to sail in areas we usually motored through before, switch from motoring to sailing and back quickly and smoothly, and cruise right through all sorts of situations we used to have to stop and struggle to meet safely. Maybe we can even sail right up to the docks if the wind is right. We should be able to save our energy for even more sailing. At least that’s the idea. All the while, the certain knowledge that now there are even more things on the boat that can go wrong is stowed away in my mind, right there next to the battery.

I don’t care. This intrepid sailor is going to stand on the deck of his tiny ship and gaze happily upon the crumbly edifice of that old abandoned lighthouse. Yes. And if the boat has to be covered with clever primitive contraptions to keep us from exhausting ourselves on the way, then so be it. At least we will have honestly sailed a whole ten miles on real water by real wind and got somewhere certifiably nautical!  (And then, hopefully, we should return alive!)

I’m still kind of dismayed at how very difficult it has been for us to get to that lighthouse. I knew that we were not really knocking ourselves out to get to the boat before noon, or really seriously applying ourselves to covering distance rather than kick around on the water doing other stuff. Still, the boat goes about bicycle speed, and even if we have to go thirty miles or more for a round trip, I think it should be possible in about five hours even with a light wind. I had not considered the exertion of simply sitting in the boat while it bounces over the waves. Besides wearing us out, those waves slow us down a lot. I am beginning to think a five knot wind will get us there better than a fifteen knot wind. I am going to start targeting the less windy days and see if that helps.

This time, the wind never did do anything interesting while we kicked around the boat, just a light northish breeze with no attention span. We were ready, Whisper was ready, but with little wind and no time, it was not to be. Our many more urgent but less permanent obligations called to us. We got our gas can and our yellow bag, which is all we need now to go sailing next time, and we headed home.

Go on to  - Finally, Sailing Again