Garage Sail

As many of you who have visited the boat know, more often than not our aft cabin is referred to as "The Garage". There is a rather nice-sized double bed in there on the port side, but its proximity to the rather very nice workshop on the starboard side means that everything gets put on the double berth. Since the modification of The Floating Bear from sail to powerboat, the sails from The Bear landed - you guessed it - in the aft cabin. They had 5 sails, we had 4 extra sails, and something had to be done.

All of the sails hanging up and the ones on the floor were in our aft cabin. Good thing nobody wanted to visit! The biggest one there is the reacher folded in half. It's huge!

The original plan was to sell them on Craigslist, but time constraints and the lack of energy levels from what we can only assume has been a case of pneumonia have severely limited our desire to spend months selling used sails. We needed the room. We and the kids both needed the money.  We decided to keep one spare jib for our boat just in case we happened to blow ours out. A friend decided he wanted the hank on staysail that we took off when we converted to roller furling. Another friend declined on the huge reacher because, even as huge as it was, it was 6 feet too short for their 46 foot Hylas. We borrowed a van from a very good friend and off we headed to Second Wind Sails, with 8 sails: 3 jibs, 2 mains and a spinnaker from The Bear, a staysail and a reacher from ours. While selling used sails to a wholesaler is never a good way to make much money, it is a good way to empty out one's aft cabin in a hurry and end up with some cash and a new roller furler sail for the staysail on trade. Even though the day seemed wasted with heat exchanger errands, in the end we did make some progress toward The Deadline.

Our really huge reacher folded in half

Tilt!

The shower was exquisite; sluicing off what felt like layers of sweat, bug spray, sunblock, and general grime. Just as I closed my eyes to let the water run off my bald head and over my face the shower stall lurched to port, nearly dumping me on my sitting place. Not unexpected, right? Boats lurch. But this shower stall was in the club's bath house, sitting on solid Mother Earth at least 50 feet from the nearest body of water.

It has something to do with shower stalls and long days on the water. Seeing as Kintala had been beating up on us for most of Friday and all day Saturday, it only seemed fair to turn the tables and take her out on the lake. Before departing the pier we pulled big jib off the roller and put up an even bigger screecher that Deb found in the sail inventory. It is a gorgeous sail, looks like it has never been used, and seemed the perfect fit for Carlyle's light, mid-summer, winds. (Someday I'm going to figure out how sails get their names, screecher, reacher, staysail, jib, spinnaker, code zero, drifter...odd.)

Once free of the inlet and with both sails set Kintala started to work her way toward the dam, tacking endlessly against a fitful breeze wafting out of the south. We weren't going anywhere in a hurry but it didn't matter. There are few things better than having no place to go and going there anyway. We were exactly where we wanted to be; on the boat and underway. Hours later and with the sun finally settling toward the horizon enough to soften its relentless assault we decided to start the downwind run toward Bolder. (There was some talk of stopping in Coles creek for a swim, but we decided to keep moving. I'll gladly wrestle the anchor down and up for a night's sleep. Doing the same for a hour or so of swimming? No thanks.)

"Run" might be a bit of an overstatement. Even on her favored point of sail the best Kintala could coax out of the wind was around 2 knots. A distance the jet would cover in about 40 seconds would take Kintala slightly more than 2 hours under sail. So we sat on the boat, observed the goings on around us, (including a ranger boat going by at full song with lights flashing) and drank lemonade for the next couple of hours. By the time we were tied to the pier Kintala had been under way (more or less) for more than 8 hours.

Ocean crossers can chuckle if they like, but 8 hours was enough to give me a case of the leans...at least as long as I was in the shower.