Finally Sailing…
With the wind in your hair, the horizon in the distance, the sea in the air, and no resistance, you’re sailing. As nice as that sounds, it’s almost what we’re doing. We finally got to go out sailing. How can we have spent so much time not just owning but living on a sailboat and almost never go sailing?
Prior to buying Rána the last time we had sailed was on our 14’ Vagabond, Blue Horizon. She was a fun little daysailer. She was rigged as a fractional sloop with main sail and foresail so she had all of the same basic controls and surfaces as Rána. It was a little different with Blue Horizon since she also had a dagger board instead of a keel but all in all she was just about as complicated. Aside from size, which seems like the most obvious difference between the two, the fact that Rána is also our home plays a large roll in how we use her.
Since Rána has the added benefit of holding just about everything we own as well as all of us living things, it is a little more daunting to decide to take her out for a day sail. We have to stow everything we can in a safe place, get everyone ready and in sailing mindset, prepare the animals, remove our sunshades, disconnect shore power, checkout and start the engine, do a last minute doublecheck of lines and wires, close thru-hulls, shutoff our air conditioning, untie our lines, then set off. To add to all of this we can only get in and out of our slip between about 2 hours before and 2 hours after high tide which is always changing times on us.
Once we finally get completely ready and the tide is playing in our favor we can go out. That’s the point at which we always seem to get stuck. We know we want to. We know we love being on the water but somehow, we seem to stop ourselves. Often the excuse is another boat project. Since there is always another boat project this seems to be an easy way out.
Finally, after months and months of not sailing while living on our sailboat, Carolyn found a quote on the internet that said, “Sailing should always be at the top of the to do list.” This obviously hit both of us like a ton of bricks. We both asked ourselves why we were living on a sailboat if we weren’t doing any sailing. We quickly realized that we had to make a change so we decided to take her out sailing the next possible time. For us, based on the tide was the following weekend. We got Rána prepared and set off. This time Carolyn even got us out of the marina and drove us to the nearby bridge.
Once we were in the open area of the larger river we opened the mainsail. Since this was the first time we had done this since our sea-trial before buying the boat, and we had just put up new rigging, we went slowly and overly cautiously. I think we both kept waiting for it to jump out and bite us or something.
The wind was mild (7-10 knots) and the current was slow (~1-2 knots) so it was very easy. Once the main was open we both thought why not open the Genoa as well. With Carolyn on the helm, I pulled the Genoa out and filled it up with air. The boat heeled over maybe 5-8 degrees and suddenly we were really sailing our home.
We had been concerned that the kids would not like being heeled over at all but once we were they seemed to enjoy it. The water was a little choppy so the boat was bouncing a bit which also seemed to be fun for both of them.
We didn’t get to sail for too long since we only had about a 4 hour window before we wouldn’t be able to get back to our slip but every single minute of it was fun. As much as we tried we mostly forgot just about all of the things we thought we knew about sailing so we weren’t trimming the sails perfectly and we were fighting the boats weather helm but it didn’t matter. We were sailing. Now the top of our To-Do list is always sailing first.
