Learning To Sail Part 3

Palmetto, Florida

Regatta Pointe Marina

New Horizons

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Twenty Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover!  ~~Mark Twain

Continued…..

Learning to Sail Part 3

4th Time Out

We have a neighbor who lives in the slip right next to ours.  His name is Danny.  He is 20 years old and is a self proclaimed “beach bum”!  He bought the sailboat, Adventure, without know how to sail.  He has been living on it since last year and hadn’t taken the boat out sailing.  He needed to start learning how to sail really quick because he was going to be moving from the Regatta Pointe Marina to a marina closer to his job at Long Boat Key. 

Tony, our other boat slip neighbor took a 3 day sailing course to learn to sail and then took another 3 day instruction sailing course so that he can teach other’s on sailing.  Tony and Keith have both been helping Danny with fixing his sailboat to make it sea worthy.

Since Tony was going to take Danny out sailing on Adventure they asked if we wanted to follow them so that Tony could give us some pointers on sailing and for us to mimic what he was doing aboard Adventure!! 

The day dawned windy, overcast, thundering and raining!  Bummer…but we are not ones to be deterred from our plans or let a little bit of rain stop us from going sailing! Yes!!  Just to be on the safe side we decided to wait till the rain let up a bit and it looked like the sky was clearing.  So, we threw off the bowlines and motored out of our slip and onto the Manatee River.

Tony and Danny were on Danny’s sailboat, Adventure and Keith, Maxi and I were on our sailboat, New Horizons.  Tony had a handheld radio and we had another aboard as we set out.  This time, like the last, I was at the helm and Keith was going to be hoisting the sails. 

Because the river is pretty shallow in some areas and so that we could take full advantage of the wind we used the maneuver “tacking”.   Since a sailboat cannot sail straight into the wind it has to sail at an angle to the wind, this is called tacking.  So if you want to go in the direction the wind is coming from you have to make a series of zigzags in order to move forward.  Every time you make the turn you need to move the forward sail (jib) from one side of the boat to the other.  So if you are letting it go from the left side (port side) you are just letting the rope go and pulling it (wenching, not to be confused with wench!) on the starboard side, right side! It is very important that you know exactly when to do this as you do NOT want to make the boat seem as if it’s going to capsize! You also have to work fast and pull the rope and be able to tie it off securely so that it won’t come undone!

We were doing GREAT!  Even Tony was telling us through the radio what a good job we were doing.  Again, this time we were trying to get to Passage Key.  What think you? Do you think we made it?  Remember this is the second time we were trying to get to Passage Key. 

Well, if you said NO, you were right!  LOL…just our luck, huh??   As we were approaching De Soto, the sky started turning really black and the wind started kicking up some pretty nice waves!  Tony told us through the radio that we had to lower sails fast and anchor faster to wait out the storm! Uuuuggg….

We hurried up and dropped the sails and motored closer to De Soto and dropped anchor.  We had just dropped the anchor and scampered below when the sky opened up and the wind and rain began to toss us around!  I was nervous! Nervous isn’t the word!  The storm seemed sooooo HUGE around us that I was not sure if we were going to be able to get out of this one. L

Maxi was pacing and whining, Keith was looking out through the portholes and going topside to check that our anchor was holding us in place and not pulling us into shallow water.  After what seemed like forever the wind began to die down and the rain slowed to a light drizzle.  Tony called us on the radio and told us he was going to sail back to the marina, we decided to motor back.  Didn’t want to take the chance that another storm would hit us and we wouldn’t have time to anchor.  Better safe then sorry! 

We made it back in one piece!  Thank God!  And I guess it was a good test for the sailboat….it held up well in a pretty strong storm!  We don’t know how it will hold up in a hurricane AND we aren’t all that anxious to try it out! LOL…

Don’t go any where!  You do want to know if we ever made it to Passage Key, right??  Stay tuned for more of our learning to sail adventure!!

El

Meander our neighbor to the left and Adventure, Danny's boat on the right

This is Danny and Tony sailing Danny's sailboat, Adventure