Category Archives: Sailing

Our New Summer Gig

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As summer approaches with us unable to go on an extended cruise, we are chomping at the bit to be out on the water. The Universe has presented us with the opportunity to go sailing each week and to learn a bit more about sail trim. We are crewing on a C&C  40 named Blue Moon. She races every Wednesday night in Commencement Bay in the PHRF class, which means she flies a pretty spinnaker during the downwind leg of the race.

Another pretty boat.

Another pretty boat.

We feel really lucky to have places on this boat. The captain is very experienced and even tempered. He has primary crew who have been sailing with him on this boat for years. They know the boat and each other very well. In general it’s pretty hard to enter a group like that and feel like you are a part of the team. But they were so welcoming and patient with us, teaching us about the boat and giving us jobs to do. Mike and I now know how to properly pack a spinnaker. Mike is working the foredeck (a place where I quickly learned that I do not belong on this boat) and I am working the cockpit. I help with the main sail, and loose the foresail lines on a tack. Mike’s been thrown into the fire on this boat because he’s a guy and they can use another guy on deck. Good thing he’s a quick study.

race6

Consultation time.

Last weekend we did the Race Around Vashon Island on Blue Moon and it was an excellent day for sailing! We had good wind for the entire race, and with sustained wind building to about 16 knots with gusts beyond 20 knots on the down wind leg, there were some exciting times getting the spinnaker down and changing sails. Here are some photos from our first two races, and some of the lessons we learned, or re-learned.

  1.  I do not get anxious on other people’s boats. There were plenty of opportunities for me to be a little worried on this race boat, especially as people jockey for position at the start line. Not me. Calm as a cucumber. Why? Because it’s not my boat. I’m not responsible for it, and I don’t have to pay for any damage incurred to that boat or other boats. Getting hurt doesn’t actually cross my mind. I also trust this captain. He’s been at this a long time. He doesn’t want to hurt his boat or his crew. He’s also not hard-core-win-at-all-costs. I like that. He wants to have fun. I like that, too.

    This could be an anxious moment. But it’s not.

  2. I now understand completely why there are all-women crew. I am going to want to spend some time on an all-woman boat simply because it will show me how women handle things like all the action on the foredeck during a race when there are no men around to take over. As a middle aged woman, I am definitely the weak link on this crew of mostly men.  At one point I went forward to help the foresail around because everyone else was busy. I’m very glad Mike was there as well because otherwise it would not have ended well for me. I was happy to have escaped with only a small rope burn to my nose. Lesson learned. While we both had a great time that day, Mike came home with considerable bruises as a reward for his time up front. We both took a big dose of ibuprofen and went to bed early, thinking about how much energy it takes to sail a relatively small boat (smaller than ours) in high winds for that long.

    From the left: John, Forrest, Theda, Rich.

  3. I can move fast if I have to. Who knew?

    Captain Forrest at the wheel.

  4. We know more than I thought. The assumption appears to be that if you are a cruiser rather than a racer, you don’t pay much attention to things like where the wind is, what the currents are doing, where you may get caught in a counter-current, how to tweak the sail to get another .1 knot from the boat. We do pay attention to that stuff and always have. The difference is that our current boat, an Olympic 47 that weighs 23 tons, is a different animal from our previous boat, a Cal 34. For instance, we don’t have a traveler on our boat. The traveler on this C&C 40 gets tweaked every time there is a minor change in the wind because that makes a difference in a race. It would not make that much of a difference on our boat. But on our Cal, we used the traveler a lot to make the boat sail better. 
  5. There is something simply glorious about sitting on the rail during a fast race, spray coming over the bow. Especially when it’s not cold. We both miss sailing that close to the water. We love our boat for the purpose of our long trip. She is so comfortable on the ocean and at anchor. But we both see a day when we will go back to a boat that sails closer to the water.

    Sail change.

    Sail change.

We’re looking forward to our Wednesday nights on the water this summer. Tonight it looks like we’ll have terrific wind and sunny skies! Let’s go!

Nikon Prostaff Range Finder: A Big Win in a Small Package

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We just got home from our first mini-cruise of the year; this one to the south sound area of Hartstine Island. It was a ‘win’ all around, but one of the stars of our reality was our super little Prostaff Range finder made by Nikon. This was a Christmas gift to Mike last year from my mother, but I may have had something to do with whispering in Santa mom’s ear that this would be a good addition to our small  tools aboard Galapagos.

Ours is a rebuilt unit, which works great and cost less.

This was our first trip of the season and we wanted to play with all of our new toys before we actually needed them so we made a little guessing game about distances over the water. You know what? What they say about distances over the water is true: it’s weird how much further away things are than you think they are. Really! It is so very true that Mike did a couple of tests of the validity of this unit by using the GPS aboard to measure distance, then using the range finder to see if the results were the same. And they were. I offered to use the 100ft tape measure we have to be double dog sure of its accuracy, but Mike just looked at me. I’m so analog to his digital sometimes.

Our first anchorage was Rosedale, close to Gig Harbor. Rosedale is a very protected anchorage and this is where you should go if you want to look at houses. Seriously. There isn’t a spec of shoreline to anchor off without a big honking house plopped down on it. So I hope they enjoyed the view of Galapagos for a couple of days. We like looking at houses, but we’re not really fans of being in people’s back yards. Still, we dropped the hook in quiet water, surrounded by private docks, and whipped out the little Prostaff just for fun. How far is that private dock from our private boat?

Sure, it’s obviously far enough. But how far is it, really? What’s your guess? That dock in the middle was our target.

The Prostaff is dead easy to use. Just hold it to your eye, put your target in the crosshairs, and push a little button on top of the unit. That’s all there is to it. Just one button. Just one push. Maybe two if you want to be extra sure. Compare this ease of use to the new automatic fog horn Mike just installed. It automatically blows the fog horn every set number of seconds, which is nice.  It came with our GPS unit. I made the mistake of asking how to use the foghorn function. Apparently it involves pushing a button a number of times, reading tiny print on the screen, and then doing some kind of heavy scrolling action down a menu written for ants. I don’t know. I fell asleep during the scrolling down part. I’ll need written instructions for that one. Good thing we have those little cans of fog horn noise on board, too. In a pinch, I can just reach for one of those.  Give me one button to push and I’ll push it. Just one.

Hold it to your eye. Site your target. Push one easy button. Read the number. Done.

The answer to our quiz? The closest private dock was 162 yards from our boat. Whaaattt? That was way further than we guessed. We double and triple checked, which is easy enough to do since you only have to PUSH ONE BUTTON! In the second photo of this post, that dock is our target and that dock is 162 yards from the boat. That is over 1.5 times the distance of the playing field in football.

Here’s what having this little unit on board has done for my anxiety about being too close to things:

aok

How much anxiety? Zero. Nada.

Now, maybe you don’t want to spend the money on one of these little gizmos. No worries because we’ve got you covered with a cheap and easy old-school way to make one, which I just discovered while going through some of our old sailing books during this trip. In this case Crusing World’s Workbench:

I’ll just let them do the talking. They ‘splain it better than me anyhow. Warning: Involves math. Now do you want to just buy the digital version?

After we got settled I plopped the dinghy into the water to dinghy out to this sailboat anchored at the other end of the bay. I thought I recognized her from when we were boat shopping years before and I was right. She is a beautiful Spencer 1330 named Athena. Had she been in our price range, she would have been a serious contender for us. She is absolutely beautiful and I’ll bet she sails like a dream.

Narrower of beam than our boat, and without the full keel, she still represents a seriously great blue water cruiser. And guess what! She is still for sale. I can’t imagine why, but she’s listed on Craigslist and Yachtworld.   She has almost everything Galapagos has, including a new Beta Marine engine, PLUS a double walled Airex hull, which I seriously wish we had. If you know someone in the market for a boat in this price range, turn them on to this boat. We took a good long look at her from the outside and took a number of photos. We liked what we saw. Just beautiful.

Athena, a Spencer 1330, sitting in Rosedale harbor.

 

Bumbling Bear Cove, Bedwell Sound

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If you sail up the fjords of Clayoquot you will be surrounded by incredible beauty. Mountains rise on either side; mists hang, shrouding tops of trees.  In the summer, the sky is blue and the weather can be fine. If you get the chance, it’s well worth the trip to travel up those fingers of water. It’s enchanting and we spent a bit of time just pinching ourselves because it felt a little surreal, all that magnificence. We know we got incredibly lucky on the weather. There is never a guarantee that you’ll have sun, much less that it will be so warm.

Sailing up Tofino inlet

Sailing up Tofino inlet on a hot, sunny day. It was one of the finest sails we’ve ever had.

The thing about sailing up those inlets that is worth knowing in advance, however,  is that there are precious few areas that are protected from the considerable winds that whoosh up from the ocean, and good luck finding a protected anchorage. By the time the wind gets to the top of the inlet, it has built up a nice head of steam and can be rather gnarly.  This is what happened each time we sailed up into the fjords in Clayoquot Sound. We’d have a lovely sail up the sound thinking we were going to anchor at the head where we could explore the river flats as they empty out into the salt water.

Another pretty view of Tofino Inlet.

Then we’d get there and two things would happen. First the wind would be blowing 25 knots, enough to make getting the sails down very exciting. Then we’d discover that we would have to anchor in at least 60 feet of water to have enough room between us and the land. Does that sound like fun to you? I know we are prone to ‘anchoring outside the box’ but no thanks. No rest for the weary and nothing to prove, we’d turn and motor into the wind back down the inlet, all in a good day’s exploration.  It is times like these I am grateful for Galapagos’ girth. She glides like a river queen; confident and strong.

Going up Bedwell Sound.

In Bedwell sound we knew that there would be a resort that took over the river flats at the head. They also took over literally the only decent place to anchor a boat. There was one spot on the opposite side that we thought would work as the depth was pretty good, but we tried twice and couldn’t get the anchor to set. There was an old wreck of a boat on the shore right there, so, perhaps that didn’t bode well for the holding power of an anchor at that spot. Frankly, it felt like solid rock to us. Still, we did try.

We were a little disappointed we wouldn’t be able to kayak around the flats, but on the other hand I’ll bet there are plenty of mosquitoes there and I had already been bitten enough to look like a toddler who’d crawled through brambles. I tend to scratch. Maybe giving that a miss wasn’t such a bad idea. Who knows what we could discover somewhere else?

The river flats at the head of Bedwell Sound.


This area, which is to port when you get to the head of the inlet, is where there would be a pretty good anchorage. Except now you’d have to anchor right by their dock. That seems a little unfriendly to us. We moved on.

Knowing we wanted to spend the night in Bedwell sound, we had been on the lookout for possible spots on the way up to the river flats. One had a smallish sand beach next to an eagle’s nest high in a dead tree. We headed for that but it was a no-go. Too deep, too close to crunchy rocks, too exposed even for us. No sleep would be had there.

Eagle in craggy tree.

I headed across the inlet to a group of islets we had seen on the way up, knowing that was as good as it was going to get if we wanted to anchor in the sound. Nosing our way behind a group of large rocks, we found the perfect place. About 45 feet of water, enough swing room for Galapagos to be comfortable and keep her butt off the rocks, and a magnificent view, plus it looked like decent kayaking. Pleased with ourselves, we dropped the hook.

Best. Anchorage. Ever.

As I was preparing for a little cockpit siesta and Kindle time, this happened:

Loved this so much!

And it just kept happening. Mom and baby nosed along the shoreline and, after checking out Galapagos per the photo above, didn’t give us another look. We were absolutely delighted. We had bear watching time for about 30 minutes, followed by more bear watching later that day and the next as two male bears made their appearances along the same route. The entire trip was worth it just for this place.

I’ve got a million of them.


Adorable!

This is an unnamed cove on our GPS so we’ve named this Bumbling Bear Cove. I don’t know if this counts, but we’re staking our claim here. And there is a very small cove next to it where a shallow draft small boat could anchor nicely. We think that one should be Cub Cove.

Shoreline of Cub Cove. You would, of course, avoid that rock.


Male that visited the following day.

Taking the kayak out onto the sound, I kept thinking to myself, ‘Here I am. In my kayak paddling on a fjord, watching bears from my seat on our sailboat. Wow. That’s amazing.’.  And I felt very lucky, indeed.

Looking up Bedwell Sound from the kayak.