A Return to the Water

It had been a while since I last made it out on the water. In fact, our trip to Molokai on Labor Day weekend was the last time Madeline & Nine got to stretch her legs. We finally made it back out this weekend.

On Sunday we went to the sandbar. Within five minutes of starting, our adventures began. Somehow when I was rigging the boat, I didn't securely fasten the line that hoists the jib up the forestay. As I started to hoist the jib, it took me three pulls to realize that it was way too light. By that time, the line was already dangling 25' up the mast, out of our reach. Normally, that wouldn't be the end of the world; however, a little while back the same thing happened and the line actually totally came out. Therefore, we didn't have any spares and were out of second chances.

The wind was very light this weekend, so with only one sail we were crawling our way out to the sandbar. That gave us plenty of time to try to come up with solutions for getting the line back down. We went from the boat hook only to the boat hook with a loop of string attached to the end. From there we made it so that we could tighten the loop via a line extended to the bottom. The boat hook was just a little too short, so Jason attached it to a 5' length of PVC pipe. We still couldn't get it to grab, so we attached a gaff hook on top of that.

Now in order to picture what this looked like, imagine a 6'6" man standing on a boom 4' up a mast with a 15' contraption pointed to the sky, swaying dangerously in one hand while using his other arm to grip the mast tightly. Add all of that up and you begin to see why it was so hard to capture this line swinging freely back and forth in the light breeze. All the while Erin is laughing in the background trying to get me to shimmy up the wires or climb up the sail and Patrick is trying to get her to stop with the jokes, to no avail.

Long story short, once we got to the sandbar we had a more stable platform and some luck. We got the line back down.

Today, Monday, "Discoverer's Day" (sorry Christopher Columbus), we went into the ocean in search of fish. We didn't catch any, but it was a good time anyway. Today there was even less wind than the day before. We motored all the way from the marina to about 3 miles offshore. By that point I could no longer take the drone of the motor. We killed the power and raised the sails. There was such a lack of wind that the sails wouldn't even fill with air. The closest thing to wind we had was when the boat would pitch left and right the sails would slightly catch the air and make luffing sounds. Weak.

We sat out there and bobbed up and down for a couple of hours before we caught sight of a grey blue sky coming our way. "Is that rain?" was the question that brought the wind. We went from no wind what-so-ever to a nice, steady 15 knot breeze. We used that to sail home and called it a day. No fish and a little sunburn. All told, a good day on the water.