Go jump in the lake!

Monday, July 5

Lk St Clair

Just as "sailing" has been noisier than I had expected, owning a sailboat has been more sweating in the marina than I expected.

But today, we got to sail.  (After we did some work in the marina).

The heat on land was nearly unbearable, but when we actually got off the river and into the lake it must have been instantly 10° cooler.

We left NSSC at about noon, had a quick lunch of pasta salad prepared at home, bobbing around in the lake and then unfurled the genny. We've still got some issues with the mast step, so no mainsail but honestly I',m not sure we missed it.  Most of the other sailboats out with us also only had their Gennies up.

the wind was a pleasant 8-12 mph, and conditions were good for me (Sheila) to practice steering.  My inexperience had meant that on the way around from St Joseph, Chuck had to do all of the "driving" and it exhausted him, so we really need for me to be a better, more skilled first mate.  I'm not very good with a rudder so a few hours of seat time really helped.  Maybe one day, we'll actually remember to download the GOS tracks from the Garmin.  I imagine mine will need kazoo music in the background and I zig and zag all over the place.,  

At around 5, we finally headed over to Strawberry Island to anchor out and give Twoflower a good scrubbing.  The great fish fly hatch of 2021 has left lots of detritus on the boat.  I never understood why boaters would go anchor out and then waste their time on the water to clean, but now I understand it's just cooler to work out soon the water than in the dock. 

Once work was done, we took turns jumping in the lake.  One of us stayed in the boat with Feather, who still doesn't have experience swimming in her new life vest.  

See that huge grin?  He's been too long out of the water.  This was a good thing.

I cooked a simple dinner on the water so that we didn't have to race across the lake to prevent starvation. The wind had been building all afternoon and I wanted to *sail*.  Just as we finished eating around 7 pm, we got some major gusts coming across.  We pulled up anchor and set off across Anchor Bay, tacking towards the Clinton River.  

As usual with us, the wind is all or nothing, and never in the direction we need to go.  We quickly had to furl first a third of the Genny and then a little more to prevent overpowering the sails.  Feather is not a big fan of sailing once we keel more than about 20°, so she went from this:

...to hiding up in the lazarette.

We were treated to a beautiful sunset, mostly alone on the lake by about 8 pm.  

Finally motored into NSSC  at around 930pm...maybe I'll tell you about our rookie mistake in another post (it involves centerboards)

BTW, we missed our first first-pass balloon recovery drill today.  Got it on the second pass.  Recovered 2 today.  Please think about this before releasing balloons (yes, I realize many of these are lost accidentally by some heartbroken 6 yo child, but still...