Trial and Error

It appears that everyone needs to go through the trial and error learning process. Perhaps it would be nice if we were doing it on someone else’s expensive boat though, but then it wouldn’t be quite so meaningful, would it?

The last two days’ sailing experience was infinitely better than Mondays’. We woke Tuesday to relatively fair skies and moderate winds. Rebecca cast off the lines while I took the boat out of the slip. We had some issues with shifty winds in the bay, and so took David’s advice to use the engines to keep us out of trouble when we were getting a little too close to a lee shore and were having issues tacking. Once out in the lake things improved greatly and we had an awesome time sailing. Note that this is the first time that Rebecca and I have put the main sail up with only the two of us on the boat!

Here are a couple of things we learned while sailing:

1. The outhaul tension needs to be locked earlier in the sail-raising process. At one point we looked up and noticed that the foot of the sail was very loose and that the line for the outhaul was all jammed up at the base of the boom. We had to point the boat into the wind to get the pressure of the sail before we could fix it.
2. This one is more funny. It took us 3 unsuccessful tries to get the autopilot to work before we remembered that we needed to engage the wheel lock before it could function. Doh!

After exploring a couple of the local anchorages, we decided spontaneously to spend the night at Stella Bay. We took a stab at anchoring but weren’t happy with where we ended up. As we were bringing the hook back up a lady called to us from onshore and asked us if we would like to use their mooring. “Um, sure, thanks” we called to her, not having any idea how to actually do this. Would you believe that I actually (unsuccessfully) Googled how to pick up a mooring on my iPhone?

Following our failed Google attempt, I then got out our little Boater’s Pocket Reference book to search for the same info. Although we understood the concept of picking up a mooring, we didn’t really know what kind of line to use to attach to it, nor did we really know what this process would involve. What the hell! Armed with our boat hook and a line typically used for an anchor bridle, we set off to acquire said mooring. And it only took 6 attempts to approach and secure it. That’s not bad, is it?

The infamous mooring.

Once secured to the mooring we cleaned up the boat and broke out the celebratory beer. Oh oh… because we just spontaneously decided on spending the night we didn’t provision very well for the trip, and we only have 4 beer on board! This sounds like a good enough reason to bust out our brand new dinghy and take it to shore. Maybe there is a beer store on Amherst Island?

Lowering the dinghy to the water from Katana’s davits was as easy as it could be and the engine started up right away. I should point out that this is a brand new dinghy and engine and has probably been run all of about 10 minutes. We had, up to this point, never been in it. It got us to shore and back, dry I might add, and although we had a fun trip exploring, we were unsuccessful in our quest for beer. Lesson learned… keep more beer on hand!

On shore, with Katana in the background.

Since we arrived to the anchorage pretty early, we had the pleasure of watching 4 other boats, all monohulls, come in and anchor. Each one of them did so pretty painlessly. The people on 3 of the boats ended up getting together for a little social time. Where was our invitation? Perhaps there was a little bit of catamaran prejudice going on? I’m unsure, but we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless: swimming, sunning and laughing at our own stupid jokes. We had a nice barbecue dinner, a late night (skinny) dip in the glass-like water, and we were off to sleep.

Rebecca writing in the log book after dinner.

The next day we woke to a bit more wind and a weather forecast calling for thunderstorms (this is a daily occurrence lately). We decided not to hang around though so we got ourselves and Katana shipshape and left for Collin’s Bay. The sail raising process went even smoother this time and we had a great sail back to the marina. At one point I was doing my millionaire impression, talking to our accountant on my iPhone while sailing the boat down the middle of the lake. How posh!

We planned to have Rebecca dock the boat today and so she got to bust out her newly-learned VHF radio skills and call the marina for assistance with lines. They are awesome about stuff like that and we had two young guys (a guy and a girl actually) on our dock waiting to assist. Rebecca brought the boat in perfectly and we got Katana secured once again without a scratch. Woo hoo!

A list of firsts:

• First time raising (and lowering of course) the main with just the two of us on board
• First time anchoring (we brought it right back up, but at least we went through the process)
• First time picking up a mooring
• First time swimming under the boat (it’s cool under there)
• First time using our new dinghy (both Rebecca and I drove the boat)
• First overnight on Katana away from the marina
• First time using our newly-acquired VHF radio skills
• First time Rebecca docked the boat