A Sterling Weekend

Porter Bay
N 44 13.785 W 073 19.015

Oh what a lot of fun we had the past few days. Friday night we went to the theater in Westport to see How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. It was great. The performers were professional and the music was wonderful (except for a really awful piano accompaniment.) Anyhow, it really made our day. When we got back to the boat I surfed the net in search of a DVD copy of the How To Succeed movie. I found a used one on amazon.com for only $3.50 so I ordered it. We can make it part
of our very small permanent library.

Saturday morning there was a fairly good NW wind. We were pinned in at the marina along a north facing face dock with Tarwathie's side to the wind. We had boats immediately in front of us and behind us. Tarwathie's turning radius is large because of the fixed keel and there was no way I could have gotten out of there against the wind without hitting another boat. We had to warp out. No that does not mean warp 9 as in Star Trek. To warp a boat means to tie lines from the boat to places on shore
and pulling the boat where you want it to go. In this case I ran a line from the bow to a cleat on a dock on our rear quarter. Then, as I moved the boat forward, the bow swung in a perfect circle with the cleat in the center. As soon as we got away from the dock and pointing up in to the wind, we signaled a helper on shore to cast the line off the cleat. Libby pulled in the line and away we went.

Today, our friends John and Mary Ann drove up from Glenville to Westport to have a day sail with us. We had a lot of fun. At first there was no wind, but after a little while a gentle breeze came up. We beat our way up wind toward Split Rock Point. We didn't get that far. For lunch we anchored just north of Porter Bay. After lunch I took advantage of having the extra help aboard, got out the boatswain's chair and John lifted me up to the mast head. You see, last week in Vergennes we approached
a nice little dock without looking up. The mast hit an overhanging tree branch and it bent the Windex out of shape. I can't tolerate sailing a sailboat without a Windex. I've never had a boat without a Windex. (A Windex is an arrow shaped wind vane that sits at the top of the mast.) I couldn't wait 2 weeks until we take our mast down, so I went up to fix it. They took nice pictures of my butt as I was up there. Perhaps I'll post them on the blog some day.

After that, we took our our new toy, the asymmetrical spinnaker, and took off down wind back toward Westport. The wind kept coming strong, then dropping off to nothing. It gave us a good chance to exercise our sail trimming skills. At one point, we tried to gybe the spinnaker and it went wrong. We wound up with the spinnaker wrapped around the forestay and with the sheets in the water under the keel. That wasn't pretty. Still, all four of us had a lot of fun today. Thanks Mary Ann and John
for coming.

Tomorrow night, we're signed up to hear a lecture on locating consellations in the night sky at the Bixby Library in Vergennes.