Westsail 28

This is unfortunately completely original…

10) You’re in the top 5% of world wide income and people are still dropping change in your coffee cup and mistaking you for a homeless dude.

9) You’re wishing the rain would come back because the snow is worse.

Jack Daniels - it’s not just for lunch anymore, goes well with rice for breakfast.

7) Working hunched over sitting cross legged in your v-berth finally seems normal.

6) You can’t even manage to keep the 10 square feet of living space on your 28 foot boat organized. You were cleaning mildew on Christmas.

5) You feel personally responsible for Amazon beating it’s projections in 2008.

4) You tried to help your friends through tough times and were completely dropped by them once they got back together and are the enemy for showing similar compassion to other people they completely fucked over.

3) You broke up with your girl friend Christmas Eve

2) Working Christmas Eve and morning, New Years Eve and morning was one of the better Christmas’ you’ve had in a while.

1) You received a hat and scarf for your Jack bottle.

Thanks to Kat’s awsome hand made gift at least the Jack was warm during last weeks snow storm!

I was stuck up in Maple Leaf (they haven’t heard of snow plows out here yet) but Jason snapped this pic for me when I asked him if the boat had sunk yet.

Kat gave me access to her Slingbox account… pretty cool for watching the OBama infomercial.

Splicing woven/braided/two-core line is pretty tricky. I bought a Selma Rope Splicing Kit because I wanted to replace my main sheet and that requires splicing. The directions it comes with were confusing (at least to me).

This two part video helped a lot though:

Final result… not perfect but not terrible:

Wow - seven year-olds are rambunctious! Gina’s god daughter Mari came down today and had a blast. She seemed to love the boat, especially the “cave” v-berth with a flash light. We made blueberry pancakes, visited Fisher, rowed around in the dinghy, played with the pointy toothed rabbit and generally just had a good time. She’s really smart and fun.

All pics up here.

I think Gina got the best shot of the day

Fisher and Mari

Team Zissou!

Mari and Gina

Fisher, Stan, Lauren and I went out in solid 35+ mph winds yesterday with gusts hitting 50 and a few periods of solid 40.  Pretty fun.

We put in one reef and, under main alone, it was too much even with out the stay sail up.  So, we put in the second (and last) reef and raised the stay sail and things were a bit more manageable.  I should have reefed the stay sail as well but couldn’t figure that out in those conditions - being on the bow of the boat was kind of insane.

We had the rail well below the water several times when huge gusts hit us.  We were heeling over around 45 degrees at times.

Lessons learned:

• Need to learn how to reduce the stay sail and go out and test
• Even over canvassed in 4-5 foot chop we were able to (barely) make progress up wind
• Auto helm is useless in conditions like this
• I’m not confident I could have done the sail work solo (given the auto helm)
• I can barely motor into 40+ mph winds - engine seems too weak to be of much help in those conditions
• It’d be nice to rig some type of seat-belt in the cock pit (not just the usual chest harness)
• Need to figure out an efficient and fast way to tie down sails that are dumped
• Need netting on the bow
• Need to build doors or something on the starboard side below decks - that entire area dumped on the floor
• Need to put in cabinet locks for wet locker and doors below the sink
• More than 4 people on the boat in conditions like that would have been dangerous

Over all though I was pretty impressed with the boats performance. Even in these winds the boat seemed fairly balanced. The inability to motor against winds like this is a concern as I’m not sure how I’d do sail work solo.

Coming back in I could barely stay in the outside slipway and didn’t dare go down the K-Dock slipway for fear of being blown sideways into other boats. We grabbed a T dock and waited for the wind to die down.

This was Laurens first time sailing - holey shit - what an introduction.

The race boat across from me reported max speed of 18.8 knots yesterday.

There were Laser’s out racing in this, which was insane. We saw one guy being towed back capsized.

There must have been 20 people kite-surfing off Golden Gardens.

All pictures up on flickr. I didn’t have time to take any pictures. These are all from Fisher. As are the videos. As usual, the sea state didn’t come out at all. I’d say there were 4-5 foot seas out there, occasionally breaking. It’s the roughest I’ve ever seen the Sound.

Putting in the second reef.

Limited edition Fisher Auto Helm Unit - runs on Rum and Tobacco

Lauren, who I think might be a natural off shore sailor - this barely phased her and it was her first time out.

The boat afterwords.

Videos also all by Fisher.

Fisher just wrote a great post on morning-in-the-life… we were talking tonight about the curse/blessing of marina life. You have to walk these long slip ways to get to and from your boat. You have to use communal showers, laundry and parking lots. It doesn’t take long to know the other marina folk and there in lies the problem/blessing.

It’s virtually impossible to avoid talking to people down here which, on one hand, is wonderful - especially since they’re almost all super interesting people. But, when you’re in a hurry (I know - you shouldn’t ever be in a hurry) or really have to go to the bathroom it feels like running the gauntlet trying to avoid the normally great talks you just sort of run into all over down here.

Take yesterday. I was kind of looking forward to doing nothing and zoning out (I’m ambitious that way) but, I ran into Fisher. It was windy and I think I was literally incapable of not saying “lets go sailing” - because, well, that’s why we do this insane boat lifestyle. Well - he was helping J & C move out of their Lake Union house boat onto their sailboat (yeah - they have it rough). So - of course - I had to help too and 30 minutes later we’re over at the house boat moving stuff.

We got free pizza out of it and I got to prove once again that a 1976 BMW 2002 is the ultimate vehicle - especially for aspiring dinghy sailors… Fisher’s El Toro:

In other news - I’ve been eating omelets and pancakes for dinner lately and dinner stuff for breakfast. I probably need to start drinking again soon. Dinner of winners:

Thanks Fisher nice shot. I’m still not sure about the flags - kind of not-necessary and thus not-needed and thus shouldn’t be there…. hmmm

As usual - those waves were a lot bigger than they look. We were actually getting a fair bit of water on deck and waves in the face fairly often that day. She sailed beautifully under main and stay sail though - was even really well balanced. Couldn’t point too high but seemed to be keeping up with others out there that day and could have definitely clawed off a lee shore if need be.

All pics from this trip up here.

C&J finally got Hello World ready to sail so, it was off to Blake Island for their first trip. It was beautiful but dead calm on the way down.

Geek note: You can totally navigate using your iPhone if you get iNavX - pretty handy alternative to idiot proof navigation if you don’t want to haul out the laptop. Best on the new iPhone since it has GPS.

They got a mooring ball but Gina and I had to anchor. FYI - Anchoring options suck on Blake and, even in calm conditions it was a rocky night. We anchored in pretty strong current in 45′ of water. Check out this current - this was at anchor coming back in the dinghy. This is on the South side of Blake Island.

I made up some French Beef Stew and Gina made some Raspberry pie. Fun dinner and the sunset was gorgeous.

I had a pretty sleepless night. Had something gone south with the anchor we’d have been on shore in minutes given the current. We were also rocking pretty hard. But, nothing went wrong so, I should just stop my bitching.

We had pancakes the next morning and then headed out into winds that were 15-25 and on the nose. Tons of fun. Sailed most of the way to West Point under stay sail and then put up the jib for the last bit since the wind died down to 10-15. It doesn’t get much more fun than this on the sound and, for Sept/Oct the weather couldn’t have been any better.

Off Seattle we crossed paths with Jim Rowen’s absolutely beautiful, tan bark sail, Westsail 28. I was Captain Slow Motion on the camera - so this is the only pic I got of her… gorgeous boat. We’re so unused to seeing Westsail 28’s under sail (this is a first for us) that we were like “Wow - that’s a really cute boat, I wonder what it is” until it dawned on us… doh!

Here’s Hello World under sail:

More pics of her here and videos here and here.

Off Seattle we were passed (several times) by this crazy ass kite-surfer. Man does that look like fun, gotta learn how to do that.

Off West Point we saw Grady out racing on Slingshot… nice J boat!

Pretty nice weekend. Some parting shots:

Crossing paths with Hello World

The new Tibetan Prayer Flags on my boat against some killer sunset action.

Dear Westsail,

While I love your portly lines and sluggish, but rugged, misdemeanor there’s a new pipe dream in town. My friend Conway turned me onto to the Mini Transat 650’s a few years ago since he knew my love of discomfort and all things completely ridiculous. Well, now there’s a US company (m65usa.com) making these new, ready to hit the seas for $50K. That’s $50K for a boat that can (and regularly does) go just about anywhere off shore, can hit 20+ knots, is designed for single handing. Basically - a mini open 60. Sweet. I might have to order one of these when I get a job and really sail to Alaska, not do this inane motor, motor thing. I can just take showers on J&C’s boat

And check out the footage on YouTube.