The Excellent Adventure

Yesterday was the first day we had the opportunity to keep a promise to ourselves.

Since we are clearly novices to sailing in general and to the Excellent Adventure in specific, we promised ourselves that whenever Jason, Marc, and I were all on the boat together working, we’d knock off at sunset and go for a sail. Yesterday, my dear friend Jonathan had some free time, so he came too. After helping ride herd on the boys while Jason finished up a tricky bit of fabric liner in the boys’ berth, Marc cleaned up generally, and I rescrubbed the galley, Jon was ready to be crew.

So off we went. The fabulous S.F. Bay Summer Wind Machine had cranked up, but not horrendously, maybe 15 knots, and the fog was rolling in, but it was the really pretty thin gray fog, not the thick white scary water-hugging stuff, so it just made everything magically fuzzy instead of horrifically invisible. Marc and I had both been reading up on snazzy docking procedures, and managed to cast off from on the boat, which looked really sharp. Once it’s both easy and sharp, we’ll move on to one person casting off. But anyway, we also remembered to stow the fenders this time, which we to our mutual horror realized we’d forgotten on our July 4th voyage (oh! The shame of cruising around with fenders dangling! Definitely, we lost style points over that.)

Jason steadily backed us from the spot, executed a brilliant back-n-fill in the turn zone, and headed us out.

Once we got out, got the sails up, and found the wind, we easily hit 9 knots, and decided it’d be fun to do a quick loop around Angel Island. Listening to VHF 16 and 14, we realized there was both incoming and outgoing shipping traffic, so we decided to go around counterclockwise, which was the shortest distance across shipping lanes, heading into Raccoon Straits, past Richardson Bay, and then a run downwind home.

Everything was great until we hit the infamous Angel Island wind shadow. Jason instantly got all fussy about our precipitous drop in speed, until he realized we were still doing two knots better than a J-24. That helped. Unfortunately, since we were now in the Strait….. it was time to tack.

Everyone has told us that catamarans tack like pigs. We’ve read it, we’ve felt it, we all though we understood it. We know what we’re supposed to do.

Nothing, but nothing, prepares you for the reality of back-and-forthing up a really narrow channel where the wind is heading nearly perpendicular to the available sailing depth.

I‘m sure the nautically-inclined citizens of Raccoon Strait were laughing their collective asses off at us, as we blew one tack after another. I was at the helm, Jason handled trimming the main, and Marc was dealing with jib sheets. The first three or four tacks we missed completely, because I was trying to achieve that sublime direction of speeding through the first half of the tack, and easing through the second half. All the books say that’s the way to go. And they are completely wrong, in that instance. The sails backed, the helm fought, and hey, now we know how to heave-to really well. Jason was late on letting the main move over, and Marc wasn’t sheeting in fast enough, so the sheets kept getting stuck on foredeck gear (darn those random padeyes!). After doing several donuts that shoved us pretty darned close to the lee shore (thank heavens for a 3′11" draft!), we spun around completely, and having lost my temper with the whole ignominy of the situation, I tacked aggressively through the full arc, Jason slammed the main over, and Marc sheeted like a madman…and lo and behold…. it worked a charm.

By the time we made it up the Strait, some 8 or 9 tacks later, we were a well-oiled machine. We turned on a dime, executed brilliantly, lost very little speed which we regained rapidly, and sailed on like we knew what we were doing.

I love my boat. I love being at the helm of my boat. I love it when a crew moves together and sails like they mean it. But sad to say…. she tacks like a pig.

Tags: Sailing, San Francisco Bay

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