Sunday, June 30, 2013

A Little Progress

Feeling much better after the little medical issue (well, except for the whole health insurance thing and what "The Affordable Healthcare Act" may or may not mean...still need to research that).  We are pushing along on a couple fronts, but progress has been limited.

Having done a fair amount of looking at various boats, we definitely like the Lagoon 37 and the Tobago 35.  We think we would prefer the Lagoon 37 as it is just a bit larger and has better storage options, particularly in the galley.  Unfortunately, there are very few of them on the market right now. We do have a couple leads we are pursuing so hopefully there will be some good news to report in the near future.

Realizing that we haven't sailed a boat in over 6 months, we did manage to remedy that this weekend.  We rented one of our Colorado sailing school's J/22 boats (the same boats we used during the ASA 101 and 103 courses) for a half day to help knock the rust off of our basic sailing skills. No, it's not a catamaran and is far smaller than anything we can live aboard, but it is the right size for the reservoirs around here.

It took us a bit longer to get the boat setup than it did the last time we were on one, but things came back to us fairly quickly.  Can't say the winds were any better than in the past, over the course of 4 hours we saw everything from 0 to 20 knots from numerous directions.  It is probably a good thing that it started out on the calmer side.  We were able to practice a number of the basic maneuvers.  After the winds picked up and seemed to be sticking around, we decided to tuck a reef in the main.  Knock a little more dust off of old memories and we got the reef in...so of course the wind dies down about a minute later...and we get to practice shaking out the reef.

We get back to the dock, get fenders deployed and dock lines set and docking the boat went off without a hitch.  Almost looked like we knew what we were doing...almost.  I'm sure no one noticed that I probably should have started with the stern dock line instead of the bow one (they like us to enter the slip bow first).  But no fiberglass was chipped or paint was scratched and only the fenders touched the dock so it went well.  Overall, other than a few glitches that were to be expected, we met our goal and had some fun in the process.

Now if we can only find "our" boat.

2 comments:

  1. Glad that you are making progress. We are on a 34' sailboat, but when Phil docks the boat, I usually jump off with the bow line and the he gets the stern line after he stops the boat. That's just we don't, I'm sure yo are finding what works for you.
    Lorraine
    S/V Changes
    Changesgoingsouth.com

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    1. Yeah, I think it depends on where the cleats are mounted. In that particular slip the front cleat is pretty close to the end of the slip so the bow line isn't effective to stop the boat if you needed to wrap it around the cleat and there isn't another cleat suitable for the length of the bow lines on these rental boats (if that made any sense...my engineering brain over-analyzing things). Fortunately we do know to dock very slowly so no real leverage was needed to halt the boat. :-)

      Our big shock was realizing how long it had actually been since we last went sailing. Definitely need to get out on the water more.

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