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!

Jarrell Cove Holiday

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We’ve decided that since we can’t have a long cruise this summer (BOOO!!!) we will do long weekends exploring south Puget Sound. As a rule, south sound is less crowded than the northern area and there are a lot of quiet areas to anchor, even if most of them are surrounded by houses.  Our engine, Hiram, got all the pent up energy out of his system on this trip, although we actually got plenty of sailing in as well. That’s kind of unusual in the south sound. We’ll take it!

Hey, that’s a Cal 34 sailing there!

So off we went to the lovely little Jarrell Cove on the north end of Harstine Island. We took off on Thursday evening, figuring we’d take advantage of the currents for a head start down to the island. We had an ulterior motive: to visit good friends Rose and Gary Benz, see their cute little Vivacity 20, Mudduck, and convince Rose to cook dinner for us.

Mudduck is like a boat for fairies. That boarding ladder is so tiny it borders on adorable. See how she sparkles?

The last time we were in Jarrell Cove was so long ago I’d have to do math to figure it out. You know how I feel about math. We had just sold our Catalina 27 to a woman who lived on Harstine Island and had docked the boat at a small private marina there. We had some boat stuff to bring her so decided to make the trek. Aboard our new-to-us Cal34, it took us an entire long day to get there. It seemed like such a long way.

After spending two nights in Rosedale catching our breath and doing a few boat projects, we had a nice downwind sail up Case Inlet to the northern shore of Stretch Island for a night, hoping to go ashore and walk a bit. Okay. I’m just going to say this: waste of time. There is a park on Stretch Island but perhaps the island is named for what a ‘stretch’ it is to say that this park is anything but a small beach, surrounded by – you guessed it- houses. Can you tell I’m ready for a little anchor time in the wilds of Canada? We anchored in front of a houseless sandy bluff and didn’t even get off the boat. Should have just gone directly to Jarrell Cove. Next time.

Scene from the side of a very sweet workshop.

Scene from the side of a very sweet workshop.

The wind shifted for us overnight, and we sailed into Jarrell Cove the following day, looking for a place to anchor. Perhaps my memory is bad, but it seems to me like we anchored out last time we were there. This time there were no places to anchor inside the cove, which was filled with mooring balls from the state park, as well as private mooring balls. We decided to pick up a ball, as it would be good practice.

The last time we tried this on Galapagos it was at James Island in the San Juans. The boat was new to us and I was filled with anxiety about the closeness of rocky cliffs. Mike was filled with anxiety about my anxiety. It was windy. We tried a couple of times, then bailed on the whole project instead of stopping, calming Amy G. Dala down, and coming up with another plan. It was dead disappointing and we felt like mooring ball failures.

There she is!

This time was way different! We had at least two plans before we even started. I helmed the boat, Mike lay flat on the deck just by the cockpit, and we picked it up on the first pass. Take THAT people on the nice Beneteau hoping for dinner and a show! Nothing to see here except a pretty boat! Go back to your previously scheduled drinking party. We high fived and I was so excited I posted to Facebook.

Tiny bitty winches and a tiny winch handle. Coming from our big boat, these amaze me.

We hooked up with Rose and Gary and prepared for a fun-filled afternoon and evening kayaking, showing off Galapagos, looking at boats, and visiting. The thing about Rose and Gary is that they like little boats. They like them so much that they own at least 10 of them, including that cute little twin keel Vivacity, 6 kayaks, a minto, a double kayak, and a zodiac. They are our heroes. In retirement, they live a life we aspire to live. They are in a great community of people who do things together and support each other,  have a wonderful place on the water where they can launch their little boats anytime they want to, and they have huge his and hers workshops where they can putter around and make lovely things. Seriously, if Harstine Island were not in the south sound (read: not enough sunshine, winters too long and dark for us) we would consider retiring there.

Rose also has a number of industrial sewing machines, since she used to have a saddle and tackle shop.

We spent a completely quiet night on the mooring ball and awoke to brilliant sunshine for our motorboat ride back home. It’s sure hard to leave when the day is so pretty and warm and the cockpit is so comfortable. No wind, but we continue to be amazed at how fast this boat goes compared to our Cal34. We left Jarrell Cove at noon and arrived back in our slip by 4:30. Whaaatt?? Of course, timing is everything through the narrows, but still, we were pushing 10 knots with a lift of about 2 knots from current. Not bad at all! I guess size really does matter.

Need a screw or nail, or brad, or anything else?

Back in Tacoma three friends waited on the dock, having seen us coming. I sure appreciate it when people run to help, just in case we need it. It makes my docking anxiety go way down. When was the last time we got that kind of help with stuff at home? I’m staring at the rocks that need cementing around that pond in my yard. I don’t see anyone at my front door here with big smiles on their faces, arms outstretched to catch bags of mortar …just saying. Our marina is pretty great.

Mike always makes a little list of things he’s decided to do to the boat at the end of every trip.

 

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.