Recently in hello sailor Category

last friday i sailed with my usual crew in the SBYC beercan, and we finished so last that they assumed we didn't finish. we got off to a really bad start because nobody had looked up what our starting time was so we started late. but we recovered from that pretty well, until we had a near-collision that dunked everyone and had the skipper ready to kick the hull of the other boat. we even recovered from that, though it shook me up a bit. then, we made some poor navigational choices and ended up with no wind. though we finished the race, without any wind, we came in dead last.

this week was different. we had 2 different crew members, one of whom was an experienced racing captain with excellent helpful advice. two people brought copies of the routes and start times, so although we were a little off, it was a matter of tactics and not an epic blunder like last time. we worked well together, and i learned quite a lot from the fresh perspectives of the two sailors i'd not met before. we had a really poorly executed rounding, where we had only moments before finished de-rigging a small jib and rigging a genoa, because we were running out of wind. we had to jibe to make it to the mark, and then i was instructed to human-pole the spinnaker and raise the headsail, two tasks which (for me at least) are mutually exclusive. i raised the headsail which i suppose was the correct choice, but in the confusion (the guy doing foredeck was not the person i was used to, and he was saying and doing things i wasn't expecting) i forgot to blow the spinnaker halyard. fortunately, the skipper was up to the task of shouting, and shouted at me until i remembered.

miraculously, it all came together, a combination of skilled sailing and light, forgiving winds, and we rounded the mark to beat upwind, overtaking a couple of boats, and tactically blocking another from finishing (fun! and legal!). we dropped off a crewman at the club and headed back to TI to put away the boat. sadly, we didn't make it back to sbyc in time for dinner, but we did get back (and through the giants game exodus) in time to see that we came in 2nd. now that i think if it, i'm not sure if that's second in our class or 2nd overall -- it might actually be 2nd overall. anyhow, we did great, and since it was the last sbyc beercan, we ended with a much better race than had we skipped this race.

afterwards, i ended up having pupusas in the mission, or on mission, i dunno which. the Captain and i cursed the hipsters who were ruining the neighborhood, like the one who walked in front of us with his skinny legs, tight black denim, cowboy boots, and back-pocket flask. i had to hold in my laughter. ha! dork.

got home just after midnight. what a day.

also, as we were bringing the boat back in, i announced that i had failed to locate one of my beards and worried that it may have been lost at sea. that got a laugh, from me, too. i found it shortly after.

i am not sailing, though.

the Captain is away for a week or two, and I suspect but do not know that Uproar and Downtown don't tend to sail without him, even though it's their boat and they're both competent enough to do it.

those kite surfers sure seem to be having fun. hope they enjoy the skin/bowel/eye cancer.

today's outing was 1/2 racing practice and 1/2 pleasure sail. pleasure sail last week was beer-on-board, pleasure sailing this week was stop-for-beer. both fine choices.

racing practice was also good stuff: i worked the mast position again, pulling lines. i made a huge mistake dousing the spinnaker and pinned the jib sheet, but to my credit, i didn't do that the second or third time i doused the kite. in other words: learning took place.

i'm still slow as a snail hoisting the sails. i don't know if i can claim to be learning on that. the halyards are slippery, and though i'm strong, i'm not fast. but today's practice helped a lot with knowledge, confidence, and balance. i'm getting better.

The Liver says he doesn't really do racing, only pleasure sails. I told the Captain I might adopt The Liver's attitude if he (the Captain) keeps yelling at me. I was joking but don't tell him I said that.

We had a brief bit of actual racing -- another J24 was out and we raced each other for a bit. They were flying a smaller headsail than us but still smoked us. I confirmed later on with Uproar that this means what I thought it meant: we suck. Not only that, but of the 4 people on the other boat, only one was a sailor, the others were just rail meat. Not even rail meat: they never hiked at all.

That said, one of the reasons I didn't stick with sailing the first time around is because I wanted someone more competent than me on the boat, in command. The Captain isn't just "more competent than me", he's extremely competent. Cool headed, confidence inspiring, and all the good stuff you want in someone skippering your boat. We may not be the fastest boat on the water, but I'm fairly convinced that when the going gets tough, I'm on the right boat.

Maybe I'm just easily fooled ;)

After practice we picked up a friend of Uproar's and went for our pleasure cruise. Uproar made sangwiches and we ate them, despairing loudly that there was no beer. To rectify this, we moored (possibly illegally) at some crummy commercial dock and Doc and The Liver disembarked and walked to a nearby liquor store. They came back with What's Needed For Pleasure Sailing, and off we went again.

we saw one of these and that was pretty cool. i don't think i've seen a double-mast catamaran before. there were a ton of sailboats on the water today, though few got the pre-lunch start that we had, and even fewer docked for a beer run.

in the past, when doing a friday sail, i've been wiped out on saturday. this bodes ill for my ride tomorrow, but i feel rather quite peppy at the moment, so maybe i can hold on to that and make it work tomorrow.

although this is my fourth to sixth time on this boat, i have not sailed with the same crew twice. meeting people! it strains my nickname imagination.

into having a second beer on the boat.

it didn't take much.

mmmmm, speakeasy amber. smells great, tastes malty! a bit inspirational, in fact.

i'm spending more time on a boat than off, lately.

that is good.

you betcha!

the captain invited us and some of his and our friends to go out for a nice relaxing pleasure sail on his boat on the fourth, and then come back to his place after for a bbq.

by 7/3, everyone but me, hops, and tom petty had backed down, so it was just the 4 of us on the boat.

okay, just the three of us.

the weather was initially foggy but cleared up quickly and became the perfect weather for sailing. the mood was far more relaxed than a race, we didn't get exceptionally wet, and nobody got hit by the boom. we sailed from berkeley to angel island, where we got off, had lunch, and hiked around the island. we sailed back to berkeley in time to miss all the hubbub that was amassing at the marina, which is just what we wanted.

the hike featured a date-appropriate discussion of idealized governments and why we can't seem to manage to get one, plus beer and a crab sangwich.

on the way back to the captain's residence, he remarked that things were going fantastically well and there was not even much traffic. i would have thought a sailor would know not to tempt fate by saying such things. the traffic remained mild but halfway through the barbecue the gas ran out, and being the 4th, and past 8pm, there was no place to go for more. the "barbecue" finished in the oven and on the stove, and we had a great time ridiculing the captain for the rest of the evening (and i'm not even done with it yet).

all in all, a swell way to spend a 4th.

on angel island we saw a guy carrying what looked like a coon skin cap, and when he asked us to take his picture, i asked whether he was going to wear his hat for the shot. it turned out to be a fuzzy shield for a mic, he's a sfx recording engineer or something and the dead cat thing filtered out the copious wind of angel island. also, there was a lizard.

i can still hear swamp shouting at me "stay on the boat! stay on the boat!!"

that was a funny moment. i had thought of it, i was simply doing a very poor job of actually doing it.

i got 12 hours of sleep last night.

sailing tired me the fack out.

this time i had to pull ropes on the boat, and man, did i do a lousy job. the middle of a race is a fun time to learn how to do things, especially with a short-tempered shouty captain like ours. heh.

fortunately, i got some good pointers on how to properly pull the ropes under racing conditions. i tried to stay out of the middle of some arguments about how things should be done, and since i've already tried things one way, i can try them the other way next time and see how it goes.

the race was at south beach, again, and this time we took the boat back to TI before having dinner. as it was, we got back to the marina in time for the captain and i to split a hot dog bun. heh. that is fine, there were plenty of beans to go around.

we didn't place a whole lot better than our first SB beercan, but we also were shorthanded and ran into a lot of wind "holes". at this point, things like place and strategy do not concern me. i try to do the best i can, stay on the boat (wait, the other order, which is why i was so slow dousing the spinnaker) and improve a bit time over time.

15 minutes before heading out to the boat, i noticed that my "boating shoes" were in really bad shape: the rubber soles were about to separate from the shoe. i used to keep a pair of jungle boots in my trunk, which would have neatly saved the day, but for some reason they aren't in there any more. so i arranged to have some duck tape at the boat, and i taped my shoes together. this kept them from flying apart dangerously, but had the unfortunate side effect of making them dangerously slippery. i had some shoe-related slowness, but no shoe-related tragedies. but that's pretty much it for those shoes. i liked them while they were good :(

anyhow, it was fun, as always, and i look forward to going out again, even if it's only going to get harder.

i'm sailing this afternoon. i've known that for several days, however, it was only this morning when i did the math: there will be one fewer person on the boat than the other 2 times i've been out. i had a sneaking suspicion that this meant i'd be doing actual work on the boat.

my suspicion was confirmed as soon as i got to work: the captain pointed out that today i'd be doing actual work, since there would be only 4 of us.

great!

i mean... great.