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.

It may be well before my sail­ing sea­son gets under­way, but I hap­pened to be in a West Marine recently for other rea­sons and I fig­ured that I might as well grab myself this year’s Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book. I may not have any use for it now, but I will even­tu­ally and it does a fan­tas­tic job of remind­ing me of sail­ing; oh man, boats.

Synchronicity had her first mar­itime dif­fi­cul­ties today or, rather, I had my first dif­fi­cul­ties with her today. She’s fine and, other than bruised egos, Dave and I are fine as well. Tomorrow, hope­fully, we’ll do a bet­ter job.

We (Liz, my sail­ing part­ner, and I) were out rac­ing Tech Dinghys with the rest of the sail­ing team dur­ing prac­tice yes­ter­day when we noticed that one of the other dinghys had taken on a third per­son and hoisted a Jolly Roger. Observing the behav­ior of the pirate flag bear­ing boat, it was obvi­ous they were try­ing to cap­size other boats. Now, Liz and I, being the sorts of peo­ple that find such antics amus­ing, decided to play the role of the Royal Armada (you know, the peo­ple charged with pre­vent­ing piracy). In order to pre­vent piracy we set a course directly for the pirate ves­sal. Unfortunately, the pirates saw us bear­ing down on them and a brief bat­tle ensued, the end result of which involved no cap­siz­ing and the pirate ves­sal flee­ing the scene. Having scared off the pirates, we got back to the race. A short while later, another oppor­tu­nity arose, in which the pirates were assault­ing another ves­sal and did not see us com­ing. Getting right up next to the pirate ves­sal, Liz took con­trol of our dinghy and I hopped on the pirate bow. Grabbing the pirate vessal’s mast, I was able to drag their boat over. The pirates aban­doned ship and began an assault on our ves­sal. As the pirates were cap­siz­ing our boat, I righted theirs. Liz suc­ceeded in climb­ing over the top of our boat, remain­ing mostly dry as it cap­sized and tur­tled. Having righted the pirate ves­sal and taken con­trol of it, I shouted to Liz, who hopped in. At this point, we sailed off in the pirate ves­sal and left the pirates swim­ming along side our, com­pletely turled, boat. by the time the pirates had got­ten things work­ing again, we had fin­ished the race and were head­ing back to the dock.

If we were to score this based on peo­ple who went swim­ming, the final tally would be 3 points us, 1 point pirates. Oh man, we’re awesome.

Today was a hor­ri­ble day for me; it started out good and then just went down­hill real fast come about 5p. The details of why it was a bad day are unim­por­tant as I got a great story out of it but suf­fi­cie it to say, today was REALLY BAD. Just to pre­curse things, I joined the MIT sail­ing team just a lit­tle while ago.

So, I was out sail­ing FJs with the team. I started out as crew but then my skip­per had to switch to another boat in order to prac­tice for a regatta this week­end with her part­ner for this week­end. When my skip­per switched to another boat, I took over as skip­per of my boat and another per­son was switched over to be my crew. My new crew­man wasn’t ter­ri­bly expe­ri­enced and I’m not very good at rac­ing, but such things hap­pen. Anyway, we were prac­tic­ing (or rather learn­ing how to do) roll tacks, which are like nor­mal tack­ing except that you roll the boat a whole bunch and then straighten it out. Roll tacks are good because you turn faster and accel­er­ate out of them but they’re a lit­tle com­pli­cated and a lit­tle risky. Now, if you’re doing a roll tack and you keep the jib in really tight on the wrong side, it will shove your boat right over; this is, inci­den­tally, what my crew­man did.

It’s odd the things that you can per­ceive some­times, for instance, I manged to be acutely aware of the point where just right­ing the boat became futile, almost in the same man­ner you can catch your­self when you start to fall over. In this split sec­ond, it occured to me that, since I was dressed in khaki and white as I often am, I really didn’t want to go in the Charles (no amount of Goretex pants is going to keep you dry in the water). Not want­ing to get soaked, I hauled my ass right over the side of the damned boat. So I got up on that cen­ter­board, grabbed the side of the boat and started pulling to get it back upright. Incidentally, hav­ing gone over the boat, I was com­pletely dry save for the cuffs of my pants. Sadly, I couldn’t right the FJ on my own and it pro­ceeded to turtle.

I want you to take a moment now to pic­ture what it must have looked like; there’s an upside­down boat in the mid­dle of the Charles, one guy swim­ming next to the boat and another guy stand­ing on top of the boat, dry, wear­ing a button-down shirt under his life jacket. Then I got back to try­ing to right that boat and just tired the Hell out of myself so, one of the coaches offered to help from his motor­boat and we started get­ting the thing back up. The boat’s just about righted and I’m still hang­ing from the side, dry save for my ankles. It comes the time when I can climb over the side as the boat comes round and have sur­vived a cap­size with­out going in the water. Then my foot slipped. Luckily I was close enough that I could start pulling myself up and I only fell in the Charles to the mid­dle of my torso. My head, shoul­ders, upper chest and right arm didn’t touch the Charles.

So there’s two morals to this story: one, your crew can put you in the river and two, if you climb over the boat you can stay dry dur­ing a cap­size as long as you don’t slip.