Sea Dog

It was another beautiful day on Saturday, and Paul & Sarah were nice enough to invite me to go sailing on their O'Day out of Annapolis again.  It was not blowing quite as hard as the last few times, but with less traffic and very light seas it was very comfortable and relaxed sailing.

Conditions were so good, we were able to concentrate on experimenting a little bit.  The first test was unintentional.  Sarah was on the tiller, and was sharp enough to notice that the depth sounder had suddenly started reading below 4 feet.  The O'Day draws about 2.8.  So she called for an immediate tack and we all performed pretty flawlessly.  Everybody did exactly what they needed to do without being told - even Louie (pictured above).

Later, as we were headed back towards shore, we tried going wing-and-wing.  It was a little challenging, since the whisker pole wasn't set up.  I tried holding the sail out away from the boat by hand, but it was surprisingly tiring.  I had to hang out off the stays, and with the following seas keeping my position with all the rolling was more work than I would have guessed.  And we didn't seem to get much speed out of it.  But that's why you experiment, I guess.

There was some traffic shenanigans on the way back due to some construction, but the sailing was worth it.  Though I've got to stop looking at the boat from a racing point of view: "You know, with a spinnaker we could really surf downwind back towards the creek..."  Boat noun: a hole in the water you throw money into.