Back to the Lake
On Sunday afternoon we drove up to Lake Lanier for what, earlier this month, we imagined would be one of our last sailing trips. However, we have since reconsidered and decided to keep our membership for another year. And after Sunday’s adventure I was wondering if we’d made the right decision.
Mike, having been only once before (March, 2005) was our guest of honor as we motored the 24-footer Bajan Girl out into the lake, making our way out into the main channel. The breeze felt nice, but it was sadly artificial; a side effect of moving through the water under power. This was reinforced when we brought the engine speed down, hoisted the sail, unfurled the jib, sat there, and began to sweat.
The sky was mercifully cloudy, so it could have been worse, I suppose. We brought out the iPod and cheap speakers to provide a bit of a diversion from our situation. Jessica treated us to The Mattoid’s “Party Time”, and later DJ Mike served up the theme song for our sailing voyage: Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust”. It was days like this on the lake that made us question continuing our membership. This is what you get when you come out in the summer. An hour or two passed.
There had been some nice, dark clouds off in the distance that afternoon, and Matt at the dock had taken down our phone number in case anything popped up on the weather radar, so I was keeping an eye on those clouds in order to prevent another fiasco. Around this time I noticed that it was definitely raining on the other side of the lake, and — miracle of miracles — we were actually getting a little steady wind! We tacked and used the wind to make our way back toward the dock, even heeling nicely some of the way. Mike asked if we were heading back in, and I figured we might sail around a bit more if the wind kept up.
After about a half hour of gentle but even sailing, threading the marina’s no wake buoys, we were back in the creek, not far from the dock, and the wind was picking up a bit. I remember the first gust as I used the tiller to bring the boat into the wind, one of those that makes you want to grab the main sheet and let the sail out a bit. At this point I decided we needed to get the sails down as quickly as possible. I had some feeling that this might be much ado about nothing — it wasn’t bad yet, but if history is any indication, it would be.
At this point I think I started to get a little excited, and not necessarily in a good way. My memory of it is also rather fuzzy — one of those things that seemed to happen very quickly. The gusts were getting worse and in the excitement and confusion of trying to head up (pointing the boat into the wind to try to stop it from grabbing the sails) I started to lose control of the boat. While heading up the boat in really gusty situations like this, invariably the wind will continue to grab the sails no matter the angle, resulting in the bow turning too far across the wind. Once this happens the jib is pressed up against the mainsail (not supposed to be like that), which I suppose turns the boat into one big, uncontrollable sail, as the last thing you want to do at this point is jibe — that’ll send the boom swinging/slamming its way over our heads.
Somehow in all of this the tiller had gotten turned around, which meant that the rudder was pointing toward the bow, which meant that it was behaving just like the jib, trying to twist the boat around while putting a great deal of force on the tiller. Despite my best efforts to keep it under control, it kept trying to whack Jessica and Mike as they tended to the engine. I finally realized that the tiller was upside down, righted it, and handed it over to Mike, having him steer us into the gusty wind as I concentrated now on getting the sails down.
First was the jib. I released its sheets and began to roll it in from the cockpit. As it wound itself up around the forestay, I noticed that one of its sheets was wound up inside it, keeping it from rolling up all the way. Thinking it odd, I moved on to dropping the mainsail, climbing up and tying it down. With both sails mostly stowed, I felt much better and returned to the cockpit with a heavy sigh. The wind was still pretty heavy and the water very choppy with the traffic of other boats; thankfully there was no rain. I looked up to the jib and saw that part of it was still flapping about, which for some reason made me rather nervous. I guess I thought it might catch some wind and cause trouble for us.
I let some of it unwind and went up to the bow to have a look. After a few minutes I realized what had happened — the jib had flipped around the forestay (twice, as it turned out) such that when it wound up the port jib sheet had gotten wound up with it. In retrospect I should have left it like it was but now it was flapping all about like mad and so I decided to try to fix it. To make a long story short, unwrapping a jib (more like a genoa in this case — a larger jib) from the forestay when the wind is blowing like crazy is extremely challenging. Imagine taking a sail that’s full of wind and trying to ‘close’ it when you can’t reach more than a few feet of it. After struggling with it for several minutes I finally got it unravelled and returned to the cockpit to re-roll it. Success.
We turned up the throttle a bit and started heading back to the dock in what was still some very choppy water and docked with a remarkable amount of ease, if I do say so myself. It was an interesting day in that it had some of the near-best and worst that sailing on Lanier (maybe everywhere) has to offer. From sweaty bobbing about (no wind), to getting a nice heel on a tack (good wind), to situations where you start to worry about people getting hurt (too much wind). Jessica and Mike were remarkably good sports about it all.
Here’s hoping that we spend more days up there this fall, and get some good, steady wind.