February 17, 2013
Two days of fantastic and tough training. It was the first official weekend training for the group of us. There are six boats all together, which seems to be a perfect number. Yesterday’s training was basic boat handling drills, including tacking upwind single and double handed, helming in a straight line (sounds rudimentary, but when you’re doing a drill tacking two boat lengths past the boat ahead of you, things get really busy!), getting the kite up and down and gybing etc.
Today had more focus on boat control. We were in 15-20 knots of wind today, doing more tacking drills to get to weather, then hoisting the gennaker and sailing off the wind, furling, gybing and redeploying. It was tough work in 20 knots, especially when our sheet got tangled around the prop of the engine and caused us a nightmare of trouble. We cleared it, I stowed the engine down below and we were off again, but not until the rest of the group got away from us. Fortunately they came back upwind for another tacking exercise and we were able to join right in. I think the engine is going to find a new home at the dock when I’m not doing training sessions!
So, now I have a new list of things to modify on the boat for next weekend’s training. Hopefully I will be all set and will get some time on the water to practice with the new modifications before the training!
I have been remiss in mentioning both Nikki and Katrina in the last few days of fun and festivities. On our “inaugural sail”, Nikki came out for the ride on the boat with me, and during this weekend’s training, Katrina was my double handed partner on the boat. Not only did both Nikki and Katrina have to suffer with learning the odd qwerks of how someone else runs their boat, but Katrina had to be “stacking bitch” for the training this weekend. That means that every time we tacked, Katrina had to go below and move any “stuff” she could get her hands on…to the weather side of the boat. Not a fun job on a good day! Katrina, Nikki and I have officially formed the “English Speaking” contingency at AOS. Even though I am often “translator bitch” for them, we have definitely made our presence known 🙂
Diane
February 20th, 2013 at 3:23 am
Thank you for the exciting and more frequent blog entries. The weather back here in Canada is awful. Thinking of you out on the water is a great diversion from winter…looking forward to your next entry!