Syzygy Sailing

Bought a boat, fixed a boat, sailed to Australia, sold the boat.

Category: trips

trips we’ve taken around SF Bay and beyond

  • Jon. From the Yacht.

    this post refers to events which primarily happened September 18th-21st)

    “Did you notice how the masseuse, she giggled after saying -You must be Jon.  From the yacht.-”  I asked Allison after we emerged from our respective massages at Octopus Resort on Waya Island in the Yasawa island group of Fiji.

    “Do you remember me telling you earlier today that everyone here calls you that phrase?” she dryly replied.

    I protested that she hadn’t; she reminded me that she had today, and yesterday as well, and gave details to substantiate.  I had to concede.

    I sighed a popular refrain of her visit here, “You’re right Allison,” and I think as I said it, she smirked.

    In Fiji, a distinct classification between places to stay on the outer islands is the location is either a resort or it is a backpacker’s camp.  On the outer islands, there are few or no places in between.  Names can be deceiving as many backpacker camps will insert resort into their name as linguistic facade.  I have been unable to divine a hard rule to classify resorts from camps, but have settled on three guiding characteristics.  Backpacker’s camps have all three; resorts can sometimes have one, though in the end being classified as a resort is still no indicator you will enjoy yourself there.  1)  Backpacker’s camps are cheap.  2)  Backpacker’s camps have communal meal times where everyone has to eat each meal within a prescribed.  These times are normally shorter than is convenient to my style of lazy relaxation, ie. Breakfast is 7-9, lunch: 12-2 and dinner 6-8.  More importantly, tables at which to eat are also communal.  3)  Backpacker’s camps have some, but usually not exclusively, communal living space.  Dorms, mmm, fun.

    So by this system, Octopus Resort is classified as a backpackers camp, though given it’s priciest accommodations, one could claim it fails #1. Lonely Planet agrees with the outcome of my classification scheme in this instance, though it does say: “Compared with your average Yasawa backpacker camp, Octopus is more than a few notches up the coconut tree in terms of quality and yet still retains its unpretentious charms.”

    A few coconut fronds indeed.  After a day wandering Nadi, followed the next day by a sail to Beachcomber Island (a tiny speck of sand with a decidedly youthful backpacker camp) and anchoring off Beachcomber that night, we sailed/motored our way to Waya Island.  At Waya, Matt dinghied us into the resort.  We arrived to large booms of “Bula!” The ubiquitous greeting of hello in Fiji, which all tourist-minded businesses yell towards new guests or passerby.  At the resort desk, I said I was Jon, and was interrupted with, “Ah, yes, Jon.  Jon from the yacht.”  Yes, I replied, I am Jon from the yacht.  On our reservation, I had put that we would be arriving by sailboat, and would not require the customarily included transportation from Nadi, and it only would make sense that the front desk would know me as such, I reasoned.

    Checked in, we relaxed at our private bure, (no dorms for us, I already did college) for a while before a welcome ceremony for anyone who arrived today.  The bure was ocean-side and we watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean from the hammock that hung not ten feet away from our little porch.  The welcome ceremony involved kava, a drink I had begun to enjoy.  After the welcome ceremony was over I stuck around.  Seated around the kava bowl, I talked with the Fijians who had run the kava ceremony and who were now idly playing a small guitar, singing, drinking kava or passing it to others.  After a question one of them couldn’t field, he turned to another man, who turned out to be the resort manager.  He asked if I arrived today and after I replied yes and motioned to Syzygy anchored a quarter a mile away, he intoned, “Ah, you are Jon.  From the yacht.” As he spoke, he nodded knowingly and the corners of his lips turned up in a smile.  This may have been from the kava.

    That evening I approached the bar with two bottles of wine for the bar to hold on to, I had brought them from Syzygy and you were not allowed to keep any food and drink in your rooms.  (the single small downside of Octopus is it seems a few mice scurry about the resort).  The bartender said he would certainly hold onto them for me and asked where I had gotten them.  I said I had brought them from my sailboat when we arrived today.  “Ah! You are Jon!  From the yacht!”  “Yes,” I smiled, “I am Jon from the Yacht.”  “Of course we can hold this for you!” he said smiling.  They do this for everyone by the way.  Allison and I would saddle up to the bar many times over the next three days drinking a variety of concoctions.  Their pina colada was good; their mojito (called a wayan mosquito) just didn’t stand up to ones I make at parties (and written about in magazines, no lie).  It was a espresso-ice cream-frangelico combination though that we went back for again and again and again.  Delicious.

    The waitress at our lunch the next day… same thing, “Ah, you are Jon.  From the yacht.”  Replete with little giggle.  When I asked another staff person at the front desk about a special lobster dinner I had booked when making our reservation, she replied, “Lobster dinner? You must be Jon! From the yacht.  Sabrina, this is Jon from the yacht, who gets the lobster dinner.  Can you help him schedule it?” And then all 4 women in the office I swear tried to hide a little giggle.  At the lobster dinner, our server came up to our table and exclaimed, “Bula! You are Jon.  Yes? From the yacht?”  I had finally caught on to the pattern.  Allison noted it the first time I believe.

    Octopus is a laid back resort, there are a variety of activities to choose from, but the staff is supportive of being fabulously lazy.  Pool, dive shop, great snorkeling right off the beach, inexpensive, good food (lunches are best, and the lobster dinner is totally worth paying for)  traditional village visits.  On one of those village visits, Allison and I took the opportunity to go to a church service as Fijian village culture is renowned for church services with beautiful singing.  The Methodist service was quite impressive, if a touch awkward (for me) when many of the tourists (with the permission of our local guide) were taking pictures of the service.

    Octopus Resorts is an amazing place to stay.  If you visit Fiji, I highly recommend staying there.

  • Sleeping on passage

    (refers to events that happened August 12th – 20th)

    We are currently in the middle of an eight day passage from Huahine to Beveridge Reef.  After a three or four day stop there, we will be headed on to Tonga, requiring another three days of sailing, and then another four days of sailing to Fiji.  While on passage, we have split up the watches so that I’m on watch half the time and Matt and Karen are on watch half the time.  The reason for the seeming inequity is so that I get the experience of being on watch half the time.  So that when Matt and Karen depart, if someone else joins me, friends or crew I pick up, I have a better feel for what the passage will be like with me as captain.

    I’m on watch from 4 pm to 8 pm, midnight to 4 am, and 8 am to noon.  I’ve developed a routine for each watch, and each watch is different.  For example, on the midnight to 4 am shift, other than the required check for boats, tend to our sails, and keep us on course, about all I do is watch T.V. series on the computer.  Right now, I’m in the third season of ’24’, with Kiefer Sutherland.  Once this season is done, I’m going to start watching ‘The West Wing’, on of my all time favorite T.V. shows, which Karen’s mom brought for her.  Matt and Karen have been watching extensively and I’ve sat in on a few.  ’24’ is low brow, mindless enjoyment.  When I watch ‘The West Wing’ I actually feel like I get to have mental stimulation.

    But this post is supposed to be about sleeping.  Because when I’m not on watch, pretty much all I do is sleep.  Each off period is four hours.  I frequently cut into that period and stay on watch for thirty minutes or so.  Maybe I need to finish changing a sail, maybe I’m hanging out with Matt and Karen.  I might be finishing an episode of ’24’  So that within that four hour period, I probably get three hours of sleep.  Three hours of sleep per off-watch times three equals nine hours of sleep.  Plenty right?  It doesn’t seem that way when it only comes in those three hour chunks.  I do think though, my body has gotten more used to falling asleep when I tell it to.

    On passage, I sleep on the settees instead of my V-berth.  The V-berth, being in the very front of the boat, gets rocked up and down the most.  Matt and Karen frequently sleep on the settees as well.  They closer you are to center line on both axis of the boat the less motion you feel and so presumably more comfort.

    But are the settees particularly comfortable?

    The first issue is the width.  Each settee is two feet, six inches wide.  Do you remember the twin bed you had growing up?  This is narrower.  I like to toss and turn around a lot.   I barely have enough room when I’m by myself in a queen size bed. Two feet six inches precludes such tossing and turning.

    The next problem is the motion.  Even in a small swell of one meter, you can still feel the boat rocking around.  Imagine lying in a hammock with an evil child pushing you around.  She rocks the hammock gently back and forth, back and forth, through a larger angle than you might like, but it’s O.K.  Then sometimes the evil child will jerk in one direction or another as a particularly different wave in either size or direction hits the boat.

    The motion is insidious.

    Sometimes we have lee cloths up.  Lee clothes are a netting you can raise on one side of the settee so that you don’t roll off the settee and onto the floor.  These only serve as a reminder that the boat is pitching about even more wildly.  With the lee cloth up it looks like you are in a cocoon.

    You can move the back cushions of the settee if you’d like.  This gives an extra three to four inches of width.  But then you are simply rolling into wood cabinets from time to time.

    Then there’s the noise.  Sails popping.  Lines banging the mast.  The main snapping against the shrouds. Water rushing by.  Hanging nets holding various foodstuffs lightly swaying back and forth hitting the cabin top.  Creaks.  Groans.  Cans of food sliding and banging against each other.  Is this an insane asylum?  Or should I be put in one because I hear all the noise?  I even wear headphones, though I keep the music so low to still hear everything.  The sweet melodic sounds of Sarah McLachlan are an engram for my brain to fall asleep but she does not cover up her new accompanist: boat noise.

    To top it off, sheets feel damp/dank.  Airflow is not superb.  And if you are Matt and Karen, you have to worry about being doused with water, full buckets of water through hatches or rouge waves that break over the boat into the cockpit.  It has not yet happened to me.  I am simply, and only, lucky.  A drenching is, I’m sure, somewhere in my future.

    So I sleep between 9 and 11 hours each day.  I still feel lethargic. I am ready to get to Fiji and for passages to be over for a while.

  • Getting to Fakarava

    (concerning events, June 12th-June 16th)

    I wanted to take a rugged cargo ship from Tahiti to Fakarava.  A small cargo ship that bucked through wild seas for three days.  A vessel where I had to bring my own food and sleep on the deck for want of space anywhere under shelter.  The Cobia.  A wild adventure to start a indefinitely long voyage.  Sure there are nicer cargo ships, the Aranui 3 for example or the Stella Marie X, where the ships are large with less rolling, you are given a deluxe cabin, and fed three generous meals a day.  The Cobia however, is not one of the nicer.  It was the cheapest and the only amenities as far as i could tell was a life jacket.  It would take three days for the Cobia to reach Fakarava.  I imagined three days of pitching over a wild ocean, holding onto the rail and praying my one hundred pounds of supplies I was taking to Syzygy would not fly into the ocean.  I couldn’t wait.

    On Friday, trying to buy my ticket on the cargo ship to Fakarava, I had to walk three miles from Papette, mostly along a nearly deserted road leading to the cargo ships.  It was deserted because the cargo dock workers were in cahoots with the firemen, who had decided to strike on Thursday.  Incidentally, my flight from Los Angeles was the last international flight into or out of Tahiti for a week.  No firemen = no international flights.  For some reason, domestic flights could still happen.  Apparently the airport has lower standards of safety for it’s domestic travelers than the international tourist travelers.

    In route to the cargo ship offices, a mile from downtown Papette, I had to walk past a blockade.  In the middle of the two-lane road there were just a couple of small tires.  There was also a dozen large Tahitians.  They looked to be happily inebriated.  As I walked up to the blockade, I debated whether or not I should turn around as I had seen a number of cars and motorcycles  do during my tedious on-foot approach.  I figured the worst they could do to me was direct me to an alley, rob me and leave me for dead, but that most likely the worst would be a simple get lost.  So I strode up to the largest Tahitian I saw.  He was laughing, clearly enjoying not working and instead turning frustrated drivers around.  With my limited (read: non-existent) French, I pantomimed that I wished to walk over the bridge separating Papette from the cargo ships on Moto Utu.  I stumbled the words, I ‘erred’ quite a bit.  I smiled.  I said ‘It’s O.K.?”  repeatedly.  He boomed with laughter, clearly at me and kept repeating something in Tahitian.  Definitely not French, I can at least recognize French.  I walked on, sure I was the laughing stock of the dozen bouncers, but glad to have been able to walk across.

    Two miles later, I arrived at one of the cargo ship offices.  It was small, clean and wonderfully air-conditioned.  Sweat that had been running profusely stopped in it’s tracks.  No matter what happened, I planned on stretching out this visit as long as possible.  This would not be hard, I’m sure, given my aforementioned skills in French.

    Short it was not, but I exited with a ticket on the cargo ship Cobia bound for Fakarava.  I was even in a cabin instead of sleeping on the deck.  For food and water though, I was on my own for the three day trip.  It took me asking them about the strike though, for the nice ladies to realize I should call the captain first thing Monday morning to ascertain whether or not the Cobia would be leaving.  I left with his number in hand.

    I called Monday morning.  The Cobia was not leaving.  The strike was still on.  The captain said call the next day.  I called the next day.  The strike had lifted!  The Cobia was still not going.  Trouble with the fuel.  Try again next week.  Frustrated, I envisioned this laissez-faire attitude continuing indefinitely.  I wanted to be on my way to Fakarava now!  The incompatibility of travel outside industrialized nations combined with industrialized-nation-attitude of impatient hurry-ness was becoming apparent.

    No other cargo ships were leaving for Fakarava until next Monday so I wouldn’t get to Fakarava until next Thursday.  Nine more days of waiting in Papeete and on a ship was simply unacceptable to me.  So Tuesday afternoon a refund was procured, the nice Tahitian ladies in the air-conditioned office profusely apologized, and the cute French woman at Air Tahiti was happy to fly me to Fakarava.  I would be in Fakarava tomorrow.

    I flew from Papeete to Fakarava on Wednesday for three times the cost and in only three hours, instead of three days.  A symmetrically fair trade I suppose.  I also traded the rugged wild seas for plush seats and fantastic overhead fly-by views of the atolls.

    Landing in Fakarava, you could look out both sides of the plane and see nothing but water.  The atoll ring is merely 450 feet wide, taken up almost entirely by a runway.  After the plane landed, a walked about 100 feet to the tiny open air baggage check.  20 feet beyond that was a small dock for dinghies.  I was disappointed that Matt was hanging out at the dock, but apparently he was having fuel problems of his own.  with my stellar French skills, I hitched a ride into town, got dropped off at the main dock, and asked the one boat there if he had a VHF.  I asked him this by pantomiming that I was holding something and talking into it and then said “VHF?”  with a clear uplift of my voice.  He replied “Oui!” but then intimated that it might not work.  Karen’s voice rang through though, when I called and Matt was sent to pick me up.

    I have finally joined our boat.  I am now part of the trip.  I am emotionally simultaneously exhausted/overwhelmed and bursting with energy.  I am ready for an indefinitely long voyage!

  • Another position update

    Day 18 finds Syzygy having crossed the ITCZ and within a day of the equator.  For the last 500 miles they have been sailing nearly due south in order to cross the ITCZ as efficiently and quickly as possible.  Now that they are in the southern trade winds, they should be able to make straight for the Marquesas.

    Matt and Karen have been at sea now for 17 days and have traveled 2400 miles.  They have almost exactly 1000 more miles to go and so might be making landfall in about 7 days. 

  • Syzygy position update from another boat

    Ten days have passed since Matt and Karen left the Mexico coast on April 14th.  The SPOT tracker lasted for nearly 700 miles, but the last way point from SPOT came on Tuesday, April 20th.  This was expected, in fact I’m surprised it lasted that long.  Karen’s mom has worked diligently on a way of communicating with Syzygy and managed a circuitous route.  Right now, Vicki is in contact with some people who are land-bound and have a ham radio.  Those people are able to contact s.v. Io, who are also crossing the Pacific, about 2 weeks in front of Syzygy.  The crew aboard Io are Hyo and Mike who are awesome people.  I met them when I was down in La Cruz, and Matt and Karen have become good friends with them.  Hyo and Mike are then able to contact Matt and Karen over the pacific crossing SSB net that most/all sailors check in with daily.

    So with the SPOT information and a couple of updates from Io, I’ve constructed the map below to show people how far they’ve gone.  10 days, 1350 miles.   They should be turning more southerly soon and heading through the ITCZ, a band of still air that sits on the equator.  Hopefully that won’t slow them down too much.  They’ve still got 1900 miles to go!

  • The Night Watch

    (post dated–this post generally refers to events on 3/29 and 3/30)

    At midnight Karen grabs my foot and gives it a shake. I take off my eye mask and take out the earphones I’m wearing which along with my I-Pod and Sarah McLachlan, had me asleep in minutes three hours earlier despite the noise of the engine.  I was surprised at how much louder the engine sounds at night versus during the day.  I suppose the new soundproofing in the engine room was doing something, but I couldn’t tell.  I stumble around for about 10 minutes, getting dressed slowly and wobbly.  I can’t find my headlamp or my sailing knife.  I want some light and so switch on a light in the cabin, and quickly move the switch to the red light setting that is supposed to preserve your night vision.  The cabin now resembles a submarine on high alert.  I half expect Gene Hackman to barrel down the companionway yelling “down ladder!”  I imagine us on high alert.  Matt is up, walking around and off-handedly comments that he and Karen stopped using the red lights.  They don’t really provide enough light to do anything, which I quickly found to be true, and your eyes adjust fast enough when you are up on deck. High alert deflates immediately.  The engine continues to groan away as we travel through unfortunately light winds for our passage.  I plop down at the nav station to look at the log book and the AIS chart on the computer.  My night watch is about to start.

    Before I even arrived, we had started talking about sailing a day or two north to San Blas.  However, the weather seemed to be less than ideal to the north, so Karen found a entry in the cruising guide that talked about a fine anchorage to the south that had some snorkeling and a fantastic sounding dinghy river trip.  South it was.  Next came talk of who was going to take what watch.  I knew this conversation was coming.  And i knew exactly what I wanted.  The night shift.  Wake me up at midnight or 1 am and send me out.  I wanted this for a number of reasons.  One, I feel, (it’s not just a feeling, I definitely am) behind in this obscure scale of mine that measures “personal discomfort” investment into the boat.  I don’t have much of this.  Matt has, well it’s somewhat amazing he hasn’t collapsed under the weight of how much he has endured.  Second, I wanted to experience as much of the cruising experience as possible.  Taking the night watch fit nicely there.  Finally, it just seemed the nice thing to do, to let Matt and Karen sleep together through the night.

    After examining where we were on the AIS, I head up on deck.  Matt joins me and says we should put up the main sail and the drifter.  I’m super excited that we’ll actually be sailing on my watch, at least to start, instead of motoring.  It feels so much more pure.  After Matt helps me put up the sail, he heads off to bed, and I’m left alone on the night watch.  An alarm is set to ring every 23 minutes.  After two iterations of the alarm, I’m starting to get tired, and so lie down in the cockpit, realizing that I’ll be sleeping during some of this watch.  I’m looking directly up at the stars, and soon I’m dozing off, 1/2 awake, 1/2 asleep, dully waiting for the alarm to go off.  It does, I go through the watch routine, and quickly get back to lying down.  This time I’m out quickly.  Thirty minutes later Matt is in the companionway reaching out to the cockpit to hit my feet saying “Dude, you slept through the alarm.  You can’t do that.  Put the alarm closer to your head.”

    On the night watch, there is one main responsibility.  Make sure the boat doesn’t hit anything.  Two lesser responsibilities are to 1) sail the boat well so you get to your destination faster. 2) control the boat so that it is easier for others to sleep.  Matt and Karen’s system they developed uses a watch that goes off at set intervals.  Pretty much all cruisers have an alarm set for certain intervals.  Matt and Karen have the watch set for 23 minutes.  So every 23 minutes, it’s the job of whoever is on watch to stand up, or wake up if necessary, look all around the horizon for other boats or land, and make sure you aren’t about to hit either of those.  It’s fascinating what you can see at night on the horizon.  All night we were in sight of shore so lights from there abounded.  At various times, other boats were on the horizon.  It’s enjoyable to spot lights on the horizon and watch over the next hour or two as they slowly move in relationship to the boat.  Of course if they are moving that slowly, it’s probably another sailboat.  The fast lights are the ones to worry about.  The cargo ships.

    Matt disappears back down the companionway, leaving me alone fuming at myself.  My first night watch and I’ve made a HUGE mistake.  Damn it.  Not how I wanted to start.  Not the impression I wanted to make on Matt and Karen that I was a competent addition to the sailing team.  I am furious at myself and embarrassed.  Sure, the likelihood that at the exact interval I fell asleep 1) another boat would be just over the horizon that I couldn’t see on the last sweep, 2) wasn’t on the AIS that would alert me to boats further out, 3) was headed on a collision course with us and 4)  did not veer off that collision course because they of course don’t want to hit us…. yes the likelihood of all that happening is low.  Doesn’t matter.  Sleeping through a watch interval is way out of line.  I was not happy with myself.

    Later in the night, the alarm goes off.  It is strapped to the band on my headlamp now, directly next to my ear, and so it wakes me immediately.  I get up and start to go through the routine I began to do at every alarm.  I rapidly check our compass heading and speed.  I then spend longer than necessary gazing in a slow 360 degrees off into the distance, looking for lights.  Each time I see lights, I get our binoculars (Thanks mom and dad!!!) and using the internal compass of them, note the heading to the lights and try to discern where it’s going.  If I see a red light, it means I’m looking at the port side of the other boat.  If I see green, I’m looking at the starboard side.  You can also tell things by the location and height of the white lights from a boat, but I’m not as sure about those. Need to learn that.  Next I slide down the companionway, moving as quietly as possible past the quarterberth where Matt and Karen are sleeping, generally with the door open to increase airflow and keep it cooler in the cabin.  I  have a seat at the nav station and take a look at the awesomest part of the night watch routine: checking the AIS transponder which is linked into the navigation software MacEnc, on the computer.  Matt has discussed his love for it in the past, and I have to back up that opinion 100%.  After checking the AIS both for ships and to ensure we are headed in the correct direction, I head back up on deck and do a quick scan of the horizon.  Finally, I look at our sails and see if they need adjustment.  Then it’s back to reading, writing or sleeping.

    At 2:30 am on the second night, I watched us thread the needle between two 900 foot long cargo ships doing 14-18 knots.  I had seen the two ships when they were 20 miles away on the computer, long before I would be able to see them on the horizon.  Nonetheless, as soon as I saw them on the computer headed straight for us, I excitedly hopped up on deck, grabbed the binoculars, and stared out into space to where the boats should be.  I was met with nothing but blackness.   A black sky with foreboding moon and a glistening, flat, black sea.  An hour later however, I could see lights.  Lots of lights.  High, towering lights.  That still seemed to be coming straight for us.  The AIS, though, showed their actual heading, and ours.  We would pass the first to our starboard, by a mere mile.  The other, five minutes later, passed to port by even less, about 1/2 a mile.  I didn’t sleep at all for that hour, and gained an enormous appreciation for the additional safety the AIS brought us.  I saw them when they were over an hour away and knew their exact heading relative to us.  If we didn’t the AIS, they would have been twenty minutes or less away on an uncertain course that would have looked extremely troubling.  With the AIS, we didn’t have to divert our course, and I felt no danger to the boat, though I did anxiously watch the AIS and the horizon for the entire hour.  I certainly was too excited to sleep, this being only my second night watch.  But I felt confidently safe.  Without the AIS, I would have had to hail the vessel, not always possible, and try and figure out a way by both ships.  I can envision this being a confusing hail, with both boats so close, heading in the same direction and with the approximate same speed.  With the AIS, there was minimal concern.  The rest of the night passed uneventful.  My second night watch slowly winding down, I finished most of the novel I was reading, enjoying the near full moon as it arced lazily across the sky.  My first real introduction to cruising.  I think I’m going to like it.

  • Joining the boat for a spell

    (post dated–this post generally refers to events on 3/26 and 3/27)

    Shuttle bus to Denver airport. Wait two hours. Flight to Dallas. Wait five hours. Flight to Gaudalajara. Taxi to bus station. Wait two hours. Bus to Puerto Vallarta. Taxi to La Cruz de Juanacaxtle. 1 mile walk with 125 pounds of luggage to marina office. Wait three hours. Dinghy ride to anchorage. 30 hours of traveling later: home. On my sailboat.

    I met Matt and Karen in Mexico for my spring break. After a tumultuous year with many unexpected turns, I got to join the trip for a short week. It was an emotional reunion for me to get back on the boat. Two months ago, I watched on a computer Syzygy’s AIS track as it sailed out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge without me. While I don’t regret the life choices I made and the experiences I’ve been through over the past year, it was certainly tough to watch the trip begin without me.

    Before arriving, there was some trepidation on my part of what it would be like. Would I not mind bobbing around and rocking back and forth in an anchorage? Would I crave the convenience of living on land with its easy access to a multitude of things like: showers, restaurants, home depots. In contrast to living on land, many things about living on a sailboat are simply hard to do. It requires a ten-fold increase in time to accomplish the simplest of tasks, such as if I wanted to make a quick trip to the store to get more orange juice. Would I fit into the systems and dynamic that Karen and Matt have created aboard the sailboat? Would I like long distance sailing? Finally, would I get seasick? I’ve never been out on an ocean in a sailboat. And with the oceans bigger, longer swells, it was distinctly possible that my body would not be fond of me messing with its balance and equilibrium.

    As it turned out, I didn’t mind the rolling. Though I did nearly fall off the dinghy the first time I stepped aboard from the dinghy to the Syzygy. I also bumped my head a number of times the first day. I also had a pot of boiling coffee go flying onto the floor after the boat rocked back and forth a bit. I later stepped through an open hatch, landing on my butt on deck and my right leg dangling into the kitchen. So it takes some getting used to.

    Part of the 125 pounds worth of luggage I was carrying included many of my things for when I join in June. It also included a bunch of games for Matt and Karen to pass the time on passage. It also included what I hope will soon be one of the most used pieces of gear on the boat: a bunch of scuba gear. My friends Dave and Pat Martin generously loaned me their scuba gear. By generously I mean that five days before I was to leave, I called them up (they live in Tennessee) and inquired about having them send me some of the gear. You could say I am a procrastinator. At any rate, both were prolific divers back in the day. They lent me so much gear I wasn’t able to pack it all down there….I was already at 125 pounds. But I did manage to bring down what I think is the most important part, which is the regulators and the dive computers. I say ‘I think’ because Karen, Matt and I all don’t know how to scuba dive. I was certified once 15 years ago and haven’t dove since. However, we’re planning on going to some of the best scuba diving in the world. How could we not have some scuba gear aboard? Matt has some learn-to-dive CD’s and I’m going to buy a couple of books. We’ll learn a bunch and figure out the rest. Pretty much just like everything else in this adventure.

    I’m glad to be back at the sailboat. I already wish I could stay longer. We’re planning on sailing overnight down south to Tenacatita. There’s a jungle river trip we can take in the dinghy. There’s tacos to be eaten. There’s relaxing to be done. A little work on the boat here and there. Fun everywhere!

  • Screen shots of 1st Day’s Progress

    Jonathon here.  I thought I would post a couple of screen shots of Matt and Karen’s progress.  I know a lot of you have clicked through to the marinetraffic.com website with AIS tracking to try and find Syzygy.  Like Matt has said, if they aren’t in AIS range, you won’t see them.  But here’s two pictures of where they have been.

    The first is from when they departed until I went to bed around midnight California time.  They had been sailing about 13 hours at that point.

    The second is a somewhat overlapping track of their progress until about 6 am Thursday morning when they dropped off the map.  At this point they had gone about 110 miles in about 18 hours.  If they keep going through Thursday night they might be in the Santa Barbara/Los Angeles area Friday during the day sometime.  I imagine they will keep pushing through since wind and wave height seem to indicate good weather all the way down the California coast and Baja Mexico for at least the next 7 days. There are a number of AIS stations in Los Angeles and San Diego areas, so they might pop back up!

  • Me and my boat

    If you couldn’t tell, things are coming along swimmingly aboard Syzygy. I’m immensely proud. (Yes, that’s me on my banjo on my bike on my boat, drinking a beer, in black and white — how’s that for vainglory?)

    I’m writing regularly about Syzygy — the work, the preparations, the doings in this new sailboat world — for Outside magazine’s blog — we have our own little Syzygy page, even.

    I’m proud of these ramblings, too, and should have re-posted them here, but I hope you’ll understand that I was busy. I was probably cutting another hole in the boat. I’ve written about the hundreds times I’ve done that (cut holes in the boat, and also written about San Francisco’s notorious wind, about removing janky parts, about the modern history of metals, about the love/hate nature of sailing, about waging a war on stainless steel, about the cult of the Valiant, about inspiration from a sailing legend, and more. The pipelines are full, too.

    Enjoy,
    -Jonny

  • Sailing + Kite + Video Camera

    A while back we came across these superb videos made by Chris Humann (edited thanks to comment below) during his single-handed TRANSPAC race, in which he suspends a video camera from a kite and flies it from his boat while sailing. As soon as I saw the video I had to do it too. It’s so difficult to get good footage while sailing, since you’re usually limited to the deck of the boat–but Chris’s perspective and the footage he captures is just incredible.

    Extensive online research revealed that there is a whole hobby out there dedicated to “KAP” or “kite aerial photography”. My immediate question was: why doesn’t anyone talk about kite aerial video? Surely video is better than stills? Turns out that getting steady video is wicked hard!

    Most people make their own rigs and build it piece by piece a bit at a time, playing with different kites, etc, until they feel competent enough in their gear to hang an expensive camera off of it. This is probably smart, but I was in the mood for immediate gratification, so I put intelligence aside to make room for recklessness and in an impulsive moment I ordered a kite and a picavet suspension rig from Brooks Leffler’s web site, brooxes.com.

    Brooks is the man–he made it super easy to get started. He handled everything personally, and I had my gear in a day and a half. I highly recommend his excellent little company; he is a good guy with great products and great service, and he deserves our business.

    Everyone suggests first practicing with just the kite, getting to know how it functions in different conditions, etc, but I was just too impatient for that sort of thing. So the day after my new toys arrived we went out to the grass next to the marina on a pretty windy day and just did it. Put it all together, started the kite flying, then hung my $400 video camera from the picavet suspension and just let out the entire 500ft of line. It was funny to watch my little video camera become a little speck way up there, hanging directly over the sailboats in the marina.

    Here’s the basic setup: you launch the kite and let out a hundred feet of string, then you attach the picavet suspension rig to the string. The picavet is an elegant arrangement of lines that serve to keep the camera mounting bracket perfectly horizontal no matter what angle the kite is at. You mount your camera on the bracket at whatever angle you want it to be, and then it stays at that angle the whole time.

    About the video camera: I love my sanyo xacti VPC-E2BL videocamera, because 1) it’s WATERPROOF and 2) no tapes–it holds over an hour of top quality footage on a little 8gb memory card. Plug it into the computer and download all the footage in a minute. We have used this trusty little camera to film underwater in the bay–just put it under the faucet afterwards to rinse it off the saltwater. If only sanyo would make an waterproof version of their HD videocamera!

    That first trial run in the marina created very, very shaky footage. Check it out:

    Pretty much unusable stuff. I get the feeling that this is pretty common with kite aerial video, which in hindsight explains why the online traffic is all about kite aerial photography. I think you need the wind to be extremely steady without any gusts to get decent footage. Conditions the day we first tried were less than ideal:

    The most annoying aspect of the trial run was how long it took to wind up the line to bring the whole rig back in, so I built a new winder to which I could chuck our portable drill–this sped up the whole take-down process drastically.

    Emboldened by our trial run, the next weekend we took it sailing. It was a bit more challenging to deal with the setup from the deck of a boat, but all in all totally doable. We sent it out when the wind was about 10-15 knots, I let out the kite and all 500ft of line, and then the wind picked up to 20 and then 25 and I thought the line was going to break and I was going to lose the whole thing, so I hooked up the drill and wound that sucker back in. The footage was super shaky again, which is a bummer but I guess to be expected in those conditions. Also, the angle of the camera (easily adjustable, from the ground!) wasn’t quite high enough, so the top of our mast is never quite in the shot. This is unfortunate, but no so bad for our first try. I’m very happy with all the gear and the setup–thanks to Brooks for a simple and excellent product. Now we just need to send it up in better conditions, and hopefully sometime soon we can get great aerial footage of Syzygy in action.

  • Stellar Monday Sail

    This past Monday we sailed on the bay with friends Kevin Tompsett and Liz Roberts. This was the second week in a row that we had partially dismantled the engine and then put it back together in time for a sail (and we’re going to try for a third time this weekend). The conditions were varied, and interesting enough that I’ll give some details. First, here is our track:

    We left the marina at 10am, a good 3 hours earlier than our usual average departure–which explains why we had no wind for the first 3 hours:

    Upon motoring out of the marina, we immediately discovered–via an unusual and alarming noise eminating from the engine room–that the drive belt of our engine was rubbing on the alternator belt, an unfortunate and potentially disastrous condition caused by my improper reassembly of the engine the previous day. We elected to motor very SLOWLY, thereby minimizing the bad sound, and in this hobbled and tenuous state we were able to make it out of the narrow channel and hoist the sails.

    Upon hoisting the sails, nothing happened. A situation caused by a total lack of wind (refer to wind archive graph above). So we sat around with the sails up for a half hour, floating for a bit. When the wind finally picked up enough for some proper sailing, we headed for angel island, and promptly sailed directly into the wind shadow of angel island. Disdaining engine usage–for reasons already mentioned–we floated around in a state of no wind for another hour or so. We sailed away from angel island a few times to reach some wind, and then elected to turn around and sail right back into the wind shadow. These maneuvers, confusing though they might seem, are well documented in our gps track above. In our defense: these things happen when you don’t particularly care where you’re going or how long it takes to get there.

    As we made our way up racoon strait (the section of water between angel island and tiburon on the mainland) the wind rapidly increased. By the time we hit the west end of racoon strait we were bowling along, way overpowered, under full jib and full main. Without fanfare, I took this opportunity to change into my foulies (there isn’t enough good raingear to go around, so I try not to flaunt my enviable ability to stay bone-dry). We started burying the leeward rail in the water, hefty splashes started coming over the bow. We partially furled the jib, which helped very little. Kevin had been playfully mouthing off about us not doing any “real” sailing earlier in the day, so I decided it was an ideal time to take him up to the bow to help me set up the staysail. Within half a minute seconds a big splash soaked him through. 🙂

    Thus outfitted with main and staysail, we sped under the bridge. When we made it a mile and a half past the bridge, the wind slacked off some, at which point we checked the time, Liz and I chose beers, and we decided it was time to head for home. The way back involved some fun sail changes–we went wing-on-wing for a while and scooted DDW (dead-down-wind) along the headlands, taking advantage of the flood current starting to pour back into the bay (it happens along the edges first). Back in the bay, we went off towards angel island a bit to get some room on the wind, so that when we jibed we would be ability to come up into the wind enough to use both foresails. Then we unfurled the jib again, and with both jib and staysail drawing well, we sailed just about as fast as our boat will go. The wind was still blowing and it’s a bit of a task to jibe with both headsails at once, so we sailed right into the lee of alcatraz for the maneuver. The jibe accomplished, we jammed along on the port tack until it was time to douse the staysail and main and crawl back down the channel at a lazier pace.

    Super light then quite heavy wind, and myriad sail combinations, all in one glorious day.

  • A younger brother

    Matt, Jon and I went out on a rainy afternoon and caught up with Kanga, another Valiant 40 (built in 1989) owned by our new friends Jim and Jean. We’re sort of like family, our boats. Syzygy, of course, is the bolder, tougher big brother.

  • Zero wind, plenty of fun

    Jonny and I managed to get the stanchions reinstalled, and the water pump replaced, in time to sail for the weekend.  It was a beautiful day and we had a large turnout, but no wind.  After having to bleed the engine again (three times in three days–there’s an air leak somewhere, you think!) we motored out beyond the last channel markers, tried to sail, gave up in zero wind, and floated around in a lake of nearly still water.  It was a balmy San Francisco winter day, and I didn’t hear a single person complaining about the lack of wind.  After an extended period of non-sailing due to constant boat work, it felt really good to have Syzygy in sailing shape again.  And maybe next time we’ll actually have to use our sails (they’re just up for show in the picture–or to be honest just because we were too lazy to put it away).

  • Post-turkey sail

     Jon flew out from denver last week to spend the holiday on his boat, and his parents flew in to join us (and get a look at the boat).  We went out the day after thanksgiving, got a late start (1pm or so), and made incredible time out to and past the gate.  On turning around to head for home, we discovered the cause for our great speed: a 4.5 knot ebb, reaching its peak just as we were trying to get back under the bridge.  We spent a fair amount of time crossing back and forth trying to make headway against the river of current trying to push us out to sea.  We discovered that the best place to be for a favorable current was right up against the shoreline, as close as we were willing to get–the catch-22 is that the wind fell off close to the shore, as we got in under the lee of the marin headlands.  We spread some more canvas (the staysail) and that gave us a little bit of a boost.  Once we reached the water along chrissy field (north shore of san francisco) we were home free–we were even helped along at that point by a couple knots of flood.  We motored into the marina well after dark, ending another fantastic day on the bay.  Here’s our funny looking track, although honestly I expected it to look a lot more ridiculously convoluted than it does:

  • Anyone seen my sea legs?

    It’s the nature of adventures for things not to go as planned, but that’s not much consolation when seasickness renders you as useless and immobile as a jellyfish and you’re out in the middle of the ocean and you’ve got miles to sail before reaching the comfort of terra firma. Only in hindsight, and only reluctantly — once you’ve got your wits about you again — can you call such an experience an adventure. Really, it’s much easier to call it what it was: a miserable, queasy, painful, wretched, torturous journey.

    Matt, Karen, and I had decided it was finally time to take Syzygy out in the ocean, so we decided to sail from San Francisco 20 miles south to Half Moon Bay. It’s worth noting, now, that the Coast Guard had issued a small-craft advisory for the weekend, and that the forecast, which included an official “gale warning,” predicted 30 knot winds and 18-foot seas on Sunday, and 25 knot winds and 9-foot seas on Monday.

    It being a holiday weekend, we figured it was as good a time as any to test her — and our — mettle. After all, Syzygy is a burly old sailboat, built for seas and winds far rougher than these. And since we’d rebuilt so much of her — rigging, plumbing, electrical system, etc. — we had unflagging faith in our vessel. Now, it turns out, I have far more faith in our vessel than I do in my stomach.

    So on Sunday morning, we untied from the dock, hoisted our sails, and headed west, under the Golden Gate Bridge and out of San Francisco Bay. Not long afterward, the wind shifted to the north, and the waves began rolling in from the northwest. Not long after that, we clipped ourselves to the boat with 6-foot tethers, lest we get thrown overboard. Not long after that, we reefed the mainsail, and not long after that, when a few waves broke over the deck, we reefed it again. Not long after that, I leaned over the side, and puked for the first time.

    For about 15 minutes, I was proud of my ability to rally: a little puking, and I was right back at the wheel, steering ‘er up and over the waves. Then Karen leaned over the side, and puked, and the queasiness hit me again, and back to the rails I went. This time, I wasn’t so keen on returning to the wheel. Actually, I wasn’t so keen on keeping my eyes open, or doing anything. I curled up in the stern, put my hat over my face, and lay there, not doing much besides moaning every once in a while. My brain couldn’t handle the motion, and not knowing what else to do, sent the alarm to my stomach, which only made things worse. Stupid brain. Only Matt, who apparently has a stomach of iron, was unphased, riding the bow up and over the waves like a rollercoaster.

    I puked 8 more times en route to Half Moon Bay, and can’t really describe what the passage looked like. I do remember, though, hearing the VHF radio crackle with calls of vessels in distress, and how calm and reassuring the voice of the Coast Guard sounded. When we finally motored in to the harbor at Half Moon Bay, and rowed our dinghy to shore, and walked over to a restaurant, Matt said, “I’m starving – my stomach is empty!” “Me too,” I said. “Literally.”

    With all of my effort I could only put down 4 spoonfuls of soup. That’s one of the problems with seasickness — it doesn’t go away immediately. Seeing the look on my face, our waitress asked if I wanted any bitters. Other people have since told me to try ginger gum, or ginger tea. That’s one of the other problems of seasickness — it doesn’t really have a cure.

    I slept like a baby that night, and surprisingly, felt like gangbusters the next morning. As luck would have it, though, that’s when we discovered we’d run out of water (I knew we should have checked the tanks before leaving), so it looked to be two dehydrating days stacked on top of each other. I recall thinking then, that some people call such treatments “cleansing,” or “fasting,” but it’s different when that’s your goal.

    On the way back, once we started bobbing around in the swells, I puked again — but I only puked 5 times on the return trip. I reminded myself that every sailor gets seasick — from the guys who race around the world to those badass Alaskan fishermen. Since then, I’ve been nursing liquids like it’s my job, and reassuring myself that I just haven’t got my sea legs… yet.

  • Sailing with friends . . .

    . . . is so much more fun than working on the boat all month long. The footage below is brief and uneventful (battery died) but the sail itself was fantastic. We had great wind, and after an hour or so it cleared up and was sunny and beautiful.

    Thanks to megan and lee for taking some photos, and thanks to all of our friends that came out (please come again!).

    And until the computer ran out of battery power, the gps recorded our track. Note the backtracking that happened between angel island and treasure island–that’s where we decided to furl the jib and put up the staysail. During that process we were sailing with just the main, and that’s how well our boat sails to windward in 20 knots under main alone.

  • How to describe the first time I went sailing on my boat

    What was it like to go sailing for the first time on my boat? It was a feeling not easily expressible in normal sentences; rather, much more elusively affective. And sensory. But read this and maybe you’ll catch a breeze of what I felt that day.

    Liberating. Freeing. Bliss. Matt at the wheel, slightly nervous; he hasn’t steered our boat since barely getting into the dock a month ago.

    Motoring out of the marina. All of us, grinning like sloppy newlyweds.

    Jonny on the foredeck, watching for other boat traffic. I slap Matt across the back. Whoop! Holler! I’m giddy.

    The hard work was worth it. 19 hour work days. No climbing. No biking. Just working. Doesn’t seem like work now.

    Time to raise the main sail. I don’t know how to do that. I’m about to learn. Wow, using the winch isn’t easy. That’s a lot of friction. Add it to the list of things to fix.

    But I don’t want to think about that right now. Cause the main sail just caught some wind; the boat begins to heel. I’ve never felt my boat heel. Look at it, you can see the wind flowing around the sail. Pushing us forward.

    Cut the engine: sweet! no more engine noise. water. listen to the water. The chop of the bay, hitting the boat. Wind. Listen to the wind. Whistling in my ears. The main sail flutters. It’s musical, poetical.

    Time to roll out the jib? Really? No problem captain. Wow using the winch isn’t easy. That’s a lot of friction. Add it to the list of things to fix.

    Rail in the water. Hard to balance. What fun!

    Matt has a sweater and heavy jacket on. Apparently it’s cold. I don’t notice. I’m in a T-shirt. Too busy soaking it all in. God, it’s beautiful. Can’t take 30 seconds to go put on a sweatshirt. Don’t want to. I might miss something. Too busy soaking it all in.

    Reef? Too much wind; bring in the mainsail a bit. Yep let’s practice. ’cause I don’t know how to do that. I’m about to learn. At the mast, holding on. It’s kinda bumpy up here. Bay chop. and spray. Fun! Pull the main sail down, ring around the reef hook. I can do that. “Hold!” Can’t… quite… get… ring… around…hook… ok! “Made!” Have fun with that winch Jonny.

    Keep winching Jonny. Woah! “What was that?” Something broke and flew off!” Bye bye reef hook. Add it to the list of things to fix.

    Take the wheel? Really? Feel the boat move. The wind pushes the boat down, the rudder pushing us up. Spray crashing, hitting me in the face. I love it.

    Hey Matt, we’re getting close to the pier, what should we do? Tack probably. uh, ok. I don’t know how to do that. I’m about to learn.

    Time to head in; do we have to?

    Out for 4 hours today. Pretty soon 2 years. If you lose track of time, Is there much difference?

  • Pride and Slapdowns

    At 6pm wednesday afternoon, as we were sailing out of the Berkeley Marina, there was substantial reason to be proud of ourselves.

    We had replaced all of our standing rigging–the very important wires that hold up the mast–by ourselves. We had replaced the bearings in our supposedly unmaintainable furler (“Profurl bearings are sealed and can’t be replaced,” said the rigger at Svendsen’s) by ourselves. We had sanded and painted the bottom by ourselves. We had replaced the through-hulls and added backing plates ourselves. We had repaired our delaminated rudder by injecting epoxy, ourselves. We had glassed over damaged areas of the keel, ourselves.

    None of us had ever done any of these things before, never even seen them done. Without tooting our own horn too much, some of these jobs are a hell of an achievement for inexperienced guys like us. Things like getting the rigging to fit perfectly the first time, and creating beautiful through-hull seacock installations, and replacing sealed bearings are almost always jobs left to the professionals. We did it though, and we are FAR from professionals.

    But above all else we felt proud because at 6:30pm on Wednesday evening we were heeled over and hauling ass on a close-reach, pointed directly at the Golden Gate Bridge, just before sunset, in 20 glorious knots of wind with waves splashing over the bow and down the deck. We felt proud because we had done all of our yard work all ourselves, in just two weeks and were already in the water, headed for our slip ready for us in Emeryville.

    Now for the slapdown part. Right when you’re feeling on top of the world, like you pulled off some sort of sailing coup d’etat and maybe this whole thing isn’t all that hard after all . . . that very moment is the perfect time for a dose of humility.

    I did not succeed in parking the boat in our slip. As we pulled into the Emeryville Marina a low was moving in, and it was gusting to maybe 15 knots in the marina, which are somewhat challenging docking conditions especially since our slip was downwind but honestly not particularly abnormal. However, I am completely inexperienced motoring our boat around. With her long keel and skeg rudder, she turns like an elephant and backs even worse. As we approached our slip my anxiety skyrocketed–rightfully so, because I was realizing far too late that I had almost no chance of getting us into the slip without damaging a boat. Our boat weighs 22,500 lbs–you can’t hold that off with brute strength–and the wind, not me, was in control.

    I barely got the nose in the slip before the wind rotated the rest of the boat right past the slip. To avoid hitting the neighbors boat I threw it in reverse, sending us backward across the narrow fairway and leaving Jonny and Karen on the dock. I proceeded to carve a full circle as I was blown down the fairway, able only to motor forward and backward enough not to hit other boats. Syzygy came to rest, mercifully lightly, on the stretch of dock at the end of the fairway. I didn’t hit any boats, but I also didn’t get in our slip and we were in a tough spot blown up against the dock. Compassionate bystanders came to our aid (I give thanks) and helped with docklines while we formulated a plan. We ended up powering off the dock (a delicate task, with no room to maneuver) and parked in a massive, uninhabited, upwind slip that even I couldn’t mess up. We would move in the morning when the wind had abated.

    After the pride I have rightfully taken in our successes, it was important to receive this slapdown–this reminder of how much we still have to learn, and how this isn’t a game in which our failures have no consequences. Skippers all over the marina park their boats without mishap every day–it is no particularly impressive skill. Yet it is a skill that I lack and that I must acquire.

    The next morning the wind had not abated at all, but we needed to move out of the slip that wasn’t ours. I cannot tell you the anxiety this caused me. Jonny and I spent over an hour motoring in the empty space of the marina, practicing parking around a downwind buoy, pretending it was our slip. It was horrifying how infrequently I was able to accomplish the job, even around the buoy, and when we finally turned towards our slip to do it for real, I felt more fear of the consequences of my imminent failure than I have in years. I had very little reason to expect that I would accomplish the task any more successfully this time than I had the night before. In truth, I had more understanding of how likely it was that I would fail, given the failure rate while practicing with the buoy. It was as if I was readying myself to go out on the stage for some recital, knowing full well that I couldn’t perform the piece.

    Well this time I got us into the slip without damaging anything. I felt immediate and overwhelming relief–of the sort that makes you want to hug everyone in sight and makes you feel like you could exhale for a whole minute from all the pent-up air you were holding. Not pride though–I’m not proud of it because I have no right to be proud of a success that resulted from luck more than skill–and even if any of it had been skill, it is a basic skill that a dozen other skippers a day perform all over the marina.

    So Syzygy is finally resting safe in her home, her slip. For now. I have as much curiosity as the next person about what will happen the next time we take her out and try to bring her back!

  • Jon’s latest contributions

    Jon flew home to Denver this morning, after spending a week in town with us. Here’s what he did with his week:

    -Climbed at the gym 3 times

    -Went sailing (on other peoples’ boats – a stunning Beneteau 32, a barely-afloat Catalina 27, and a 14-foot JY) 3 times

    -Went for an hour long run one day

    -Went on a date

    -Saw 2 bands play at local venues

    -Spent an afternoon helping me make a couple hundred Zero Per Gallon belts

    -Spent an afternoon slack-lining in Golden Gate park

    -Got drunk a couple of times, during which he drew this sketch of his round-the-world ambitions:


    (*clarification via notes on flickr)

    Actually, Jon did a couple more boat-related things while here that I mustn’t omit. He re-spliced the frayed main sheet on Loren’s Catalina 27, and he attached one Norseman fitting to one of our upper stays.

    Jon was *supposed* to help us do a lot more boat-related work on Syzygy, but, since she hasn’t arrived, ended up with a week of vacation. So here’s to a productive week, Jon.

    As our luck would have it, Syzygy is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Fingers are crossed.

  • Jon, at the helm and on the trapeze

    My membership at cal sailing club comes in handy when friends come to town. A prompt dunk in cold water is the perfect “welcome to the bay area” greeting. Here is some footage of Jon on a JY15–a fast and tippy little dinghy–wetsuit required.