Busy Weekend

Smugglers Harbor, Valcour Island
N 44 37.08 W 073 24.52

Well, we had a great weekend with lots of good company.

On Saturday, our friends Bud and Nan from West Charlton drove up to spend a day with us. Bud and Nan also sailed with us on the Hudson River down by Kingston. They arrived around 1130 and we picked them up at Snug Harbor Marina behind Valcour Island. Alas, although there was a nice breeze Saturday morning, it died away to almost nothing around noon, just after our guests came aboard. Surprise, the weather forecast was wrong again.

We abandoned hopes of sailing for the afternoon and headed for Sloop Cove on Valcour Island. Once there and once anchored, we had lots of fun. We had lunch. Then we swam. Then we went for a hike on the Island. Bud and Nan had never been to Valcour Island before and they thought it was great. The interior scenery on the island's trails and the exterior scenery viewed from the shore lines are both spectacular.

For dinner we enjoyed a lasagna that Libby had prepared for the occasion. Around sunset we went below decks and we introduced our guests to our new favorite game, Balderdash. All four of us had fun playing Balderdash, as we do every time we play. Nan and Libby trounced Bud and I. Before retiring for the night we went up on deck to watch the Perseids Meteor Shower for a while. We only saw a couple of really bright meteors, but focusing on the sky one could see numerous tiny meteors, almost too
small to perceive. The viewing conditions were perfect; clear skies and no moon. The milky way stood out plainly. Bud chose to sleep up on deck and he reported that he slept very well.

Today, Sunday, everyone was up early and there was a nice stiff wind blowing. After breakfast, we left Sloop Cove and raised the sails. It was a great sail and everybody had fun. We were beating up wind with the rail under the water much of the time. Guests are always impressed to see Tarwathie sail so steadily with the rail under water. Actually, that's not optimum sailing, but it is fun. I noticed that whereas most boats have an optimum angle of heel of 15-20 degrees, Tarwathie does better
at 20-25 degrees, or even 25-30 degrees. The rail goes under at about 33 degrees.

We sailed over to Snug Harbor marina and performed a swap of guests. The fuel dock was busy so we temporarily picked up a mooring. Then Bud and Nan rowed the dinghy in to the marina, met Carmello and Diane, then Carmello and Diane rowed back out to meet us. Carmello, who is an experienced sailor and a veteran kayaker, appeared to be one of the worst at rowing a boat I've ever seen. Only my niece, Lena is worse. Oh well, one can't be everything.

Blog readers will remember Carmello and Diane. In September 2006, they joined us in Rhode Island and the four of us sailed 3 days offshore to Cape May, New Jersey. Today they came with a mission in mind. I had complained before that we had never used Tarwathie's spinnaker. I had some very bad, very scary, experiences with spinnakers in the past and I'm afraid of them.
I said that I would not try it for the first time on Tarwathie without an experienced sailor on board. Carmello volunteered for the job.

Before trying the spinnaker we had to make some way to windward, so we sailed for a couple of hours and stopped for lunch on the other side of the lake near Stave Island. I was hoping that the winds would slacken some also because it was blowing too hard for a spinnaker. There is a very pretty little cove at the north end of Stave Island. I've never seen it before. After lunch we got the sail out and played around with the rigging. I had a devil of a time just getting the sail out. It has been
jammed into a compartment under the V-berth for 2.5 years. When I opened the compartment is was very musty and the sail bag was well jammed in.

Up on deck we studied the spinnaker rigging and clews. The first thing we could see is that it was not really a spinnaker that one uses with pole. Rather it is what one calls an asymmetric spinnaker, or a reacher-drifter, or a gennaker sail. It is used much like a genoa that is not hanked on to the forestay. This sail is also equipped with a sock to make deployment and retrieval easier. In a short while we were ready to try it so we raised anchor and sailed away from the island. As luck would
have it, the winds slackened to 10-12 knots, perfect for our experiments.
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The first time we tried to raise the sock it fouled. It was twisted. We lowered the whole rig, untwisted it and raised it again. Again it fouled. The sail was twisted inside the sock. We worked at it, coaxing the sail out of sock a little at ta time. Soon it was up all the way, speed picked up rapidly and we cruised away on a broad reach. The speed crept up, 3.5 knots, 4, 4.5, 5.5 then 6 knots sailing downwind in a 10 knot breeze. That's excellent.

The sail worked fine. We fiddled with the points where we sheeted it. We fiddled with leach tension. We tried sailing dead down wind. We tried heading up in to the wind (and decided that apparent wind on the beam was as far as we could go. We practiced taking the sock and the sail up and down. Without the twists in the sail it went up and down very smoothly. The sock is a great aid in orderly deployment and a godsend when it is time to retrieve the sail.

All and all, the experiments went very well, and I found this asymmetrical spinnaker to be not at all scary. I think that Libby and I will use it a lot from now on when sailing downwind in light air. Thank you Carmello, without your help, the sail would still be in the bag unused and misunderstood.

Before the afternoon ended we also gave Libby a turn handling the sail. I got to issue an order that I've never given before -- Sock it to me. (Ha ha, lame I know but I thought it was funny.)

Our timing was perfect. About the time we rounded Valcour Island and were ready to take the gennaker down, the wind ceased to blow almost entirely. We motored only two miles to Snug Harbor marina where we dropped off Carmello and Diane. It was a very successful day. Thank you both.

One more incident for the day. We motored back over to Smugglers Harbor to anchor for the night. The last time we were here, we put out the plow anchor (in 13 feet of water) and 120 feet of chain. Then we backed up and tied the stern to a tree. Then I put on my mask and snorkel and swam up to inspect the anchor. It was just laying on it's side on a rocky bottom. It was only the weight of the chain that was holding us.

This time, I didn't want to trust the anchor on a rocky bottom again, so we anchored temporarily with the Danforth anchor and I rowed a line ashore and made the bow fast to a mooring ring on shore. Then we planned to back off and drop a stern anchor. Things went bad when I tried to retrieve the Danforth anchor. It came up awfully hard, and when I got it to the surface, I could see that we pulled up a 10 inch by 60 foot log off the bottom. The sunken log must have weighed 1500 pounds and it was
impaled on the points of the Danforth.

Geez I thought, it's going to be hard to get that log off the anchor. In reality it wasn't that hard. Two people came by in a dinghy and offered to help. I got another line and tied a big slip knot in the end. The woman in the dinghy slipped the loop over the arms of the Danforth. Then I made fast the line and loosed the chain. The log flipped over and the line pulled out the points of the fluke right away. We were free!

The savior of that situation was our manual anchor windlass. In low gear it allows me to lift with thousands of pounds of force. Without that windlass to bring the anchor to the surface, there would have been no way to rescue our Danforth other than diving on it. I don't think an electric windlass would have lifted that log. Of course, always tying a trip line on the anchor is another remedy for snags. We do that with the plow anchor, but there is no satisfactory way to tie a trip line on a
Danforth.