Keagan, Lola and I took the dingy and the Macski down to the beach for a test. Lola had done some rowing when she was still at school so didn’t have much trouble paddling around. Both her and Keagan paddled out and around the yachts anchored near the beach. When it was my turn to paddle out past the anchored yachts my water phobia kicked in and I only managed to paddle around one of the chain moorings. I managed to paddle along quite happily until the bottom suddenly drops away and I can no longer see the ground. Then my mind tells my body that the thing is going to capsize and I feel my lungs collapse and struggle to find air. I cant understand this since I could easily swim to the shore and in fact would only have to swim for about ten metres before I could see the bottom again. I am just going to keep trying until this phobia disappears.
02 Jul. 12
We volunteered to be one of the rescue boats in a sailing regatta. Fortunately we didn’t have to rescue anyone and just spent our time sailing around near the race course. We are still trying to master the art of sailing so the practice was required. The first day we motored out the harbour and parked behind Nomad that was acting as the bridge boat. The wind was extremely light at about six knots and the sea was almost completely flat. Eventually we got bored with just bobbing around behind the bridge boat and rolled out our furler sail. Even in these light winds we managed to sail at two knots. Because the sea was so flat and calm Lola and I sat on the bow most of the time and Yrumoar steered herself in a straight line without an autopilot. The conditions were so perfect that it reminded us why we are on a sailing boat in the first place. To complete a perfect days sailing the dolphins were playing in the harbour mouth as we were entering. We have never seen dolphins do summersaults before except at the aquarium, but they gave us quite a spectacular show without any trainer instructing them what to do next. We eventually got back into the harbour just as the sun was setting. The pleasant day sailing motivated us for the next day and it wasn’t difficult for us to go out again in the morning.
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| Regatta boats |
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| Sailing along under reefed main sail |
This time we decided to sail with one reef in the main and a full furler. In the morning the conditions were excellent and the sail combination worked well. We sailed up and down on different tacks and managed to obtain a top speed of six and a half knots. Our wind instruments don’t work so I had to judge the wind speed by the sea conditions. At this point I believe the wind speed to be have been somewhere between ten and fifteen knots. In the afternoon the wind picked up and changed direction from north easterly to easterly and the sea became more and more short and choppy. At this point we tried to tack but ended up with back winded sails instead. I started the motors and tried to swing Yrumoar so that we could carry on sailing but she just refused to turn. So we decided to roll in the furler and motor back into the harbour. I am still not quite sure what we did wrong but believe that perhaps we need to try again and use different sail combinations next time. So obviously we are still a bunch of amateurs.
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| Rauen and Leo from yacht M'toro |
Yesterdays conditions made all of us pretty tired and the constant wind gave me earache. I knew I would get an earache long before it actually started but took to long to decide to protect my ears and thus suffered the consequence of my procrastination last night. This morning we decided not to go out for a third day in a row unless we were desperately required to allow everybody some recovery time.
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