Yesterday saw our best sailing trip yet. Me and Joey went over Paul’s house early in the morning (about 3 am) and went right to sleep. We woke up a little after 6. After a breakfast of cereal and quick preperations, we headed off to Rocky River. I attempted motoring away from the dock, but it didn’t work out quite so well. Paul took over. The lake was fairly choppy, though not as bad as the last time. The waves were big, but also fairly wide, so most weren’t two bad. We did get hit by a couple that sent the bow mighty close to the waterline. Standing near the bow was mighty exciting, like riding a bucking bronco. There was a good stiff breeze though. When we raised the sails, they filled quite quickly. The jib by itself didn’t take us very fast, but with both sails up, we got going at a pretty good clip. We first set a straight (at least somewhat straight) course and worked on setting the sails to get us going the fastest. Then we practiced tacking a bit, just going back and forth. In tacking, the jib seems to really flap a lot, while the main goes quickly. We then messed around setting ourselves in various directions. We had trouble steering with the sails; it seemed to work, but not very quickly or easily. We also for some reason had trouble running with the wind. We were unable to fill the sails well. Running wing and wing was quite tuff, as the jib kept wanting to jibe back and forth with slight direction changes with the tiller. Four sailboats came out and soon were far out on the lake.
The wind started dying down; for a while there we had almost no wind. We got some gusts every once in a while that kept us going, but made it hard to set the sails properly. We headed back. As we got closer to port, the sails picked up again. Several more sailboats came out, in what looked like some sort of training course or something; a small red motor boat zipped around between them, blowing a whistle from time to time. We sailed a bit more, then headed in. We took down the main, then started the motor with the jib up. We took down the jib soon before coming into the mouth of the river. I motored us down towards port.
Paul took over near port. We didn’t dock up very easily. Paul had to take quite a leap to get onto the dock. We found ourselves swung to the end of the dock with me holding on. Joey had to throw the front dock line to Paul to get us pulled in properly. Then we had trouble getting the keel set into the trailer right. It took quite a few attempts. We’re getting quicker at setup and teardown now.
Very nice run. My first run that we actually had enough wind to sail well. It seems mornings are better for sailing, as earlier always seems to give us more steady winds.