gwax's rumblings

The past few days here in Woods Hole have been stun­ningly beau­ti­ful; if the past few days had been women, they would have eas­ily been 10s. Of course, hav­ing boats in the water and beau­ti­ful days means that I had no choice but to go sail­ing. Sunday, I took out my dad’s old sail­fish, a won­drous lit­tle craft that’s hardly more than an over glo­ri­fied wind­surfer. I ended up toodling around in Little Harbor for about an hour, hav­ing a won­der­ful time. Monday, it was a bit windier and I ended up tak­ing the sail­fish and ven­tur­ing a lit­tle way out of Little Harbor. On my way back into Little Harbor, I was sail­ing on a broad reach and I started pick­ing up an immense amount of speed. As I started to really get going, I was made aware of some­thing that I had for­got­ten about sail­fish, sail­fish can plane. The front half of the sail­fish was com­pletely out of the water and I was going mighty fast. Sadly, I brought my GPS with me on Sunday but not on Monday so all I can say is that I was going sub­stan­tially faster on Monday than the 6.3 knots that I mea­sured on Sunday.

Yesterday (Tuesday), is when the big guns came out and the real fun began. Yesterday was Synchronicity, my catamaran’s, first sail of the sea­son. It was a nice, warmish day with mod­er­ate wind so Dave and I took Synchronicity out after work. We three quickly made our way out of Great Harbor and off into Vineyard Sound. As we passed Nobska Point and headed out into Vineyard Sound proper, the wind picked up a bit and we started tear­ing through the water. Having been cooped up all win­ter and hav­ing so much wind to play with, Synchronicity was more than a bit antsy so Dave and I, feel­ing bold, decided to let her have a bit of fun. Synchronicity was in the mood to take flight and, for the first time, we were kind enough to oblige her. The sen­sa­tion of being on a cata­ma­ran as the hull beneath you lifts out of the water is very sim­i­lar to the sen­sa­tion you expe­ri­ence in an air­plane the moment it lifts off the ground dur­ing take off. Investigating my GPS after the fact, we found that we had hit a max­i­mum speed of 14.9 knots, which I find to be admirable for Synchronicity’s first voy­age of the summer.

From this point for­ward, I’m intend­ing to go sail­ing after work every day that the weather is suf­fi­cient, except­ing those days when there’s an MBL soft­ball game. Simply put, I just love sail­ing; it’s one of my favorite things in the world and now I get to do a whole bunch of sail­ing again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 2:54 pm and is filed under sailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.