. . . 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.
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.
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.
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.
Matt and I spent last week in San Carlos, Mexico, readying Syzygy for shipment. It was a week full of victories and discoveries and very satisfying moments, in which our labors appeared to have paid off.
We flew to Phoenix on Friday night, and then hussled over to the Tufesa bus station, to catch an overnight bus down to San Carlos. At midnight I gave Matt a pack of Mentos, and wished him a happy 30th birthday – what better place to celebrate than on an uncomfortable plastic chair beneath fluorescent lights in a shady part of Phoenix? We rolled into Nogales at 6am, and I laughed as yet again, after all these trips to Mexico, we got green lights at the border. All these trips, and never searched; while in the States, airport security takes my toothpaste because the tube exceeds 3 ounces.
Matt, Jon and I returned to Mexico to take Sunshine for a sea trial (aka test drive) before buying her last week. While there, it rained like gangbusters in Sonora, so the whole experience felt tinged with a sort of foreboding element. In those two dreary days we had to fix ‘er up and get ‘er seaworthy (since she hadn’t been in the water for 7 months), we had a small part of her keel re-fiberglassed and her engine taken apart, while we scuttled to figure out why there was water sloshing around in her bilge and why the bilge pumps wouldn’t pump it overboard. (We found a very leaky hose and a disconnected Y-valve, and also found out that we’d need to replace those bilge pumps.) Welcome to boat-ownership, right? Continue reading “the adventure is ON!”