Finally Logged More Sail Time

I spent somewhere between 150 and 300 hours building the boat, but until this week I only had her under sail twice. I have had her out rowing quite a bit, mostly at night, but sailing is a daytime activity requiring certain weather conditions and a certain amount of energy on my part to take everything out of the boat house, rig and un-rig. This week I am free from the exhaustion of my regular routine.


Yesterday I took a friend of mine and his dog out in the boat. I had my qualms about the dog. I left my own dog on shore, but Middy the Blue Heeler did alright. It did prevent my human passenger from reaching his full first mate and ballast potential. I think our center of gravity was too far forward, but couldn't be altered much because of the dog placement. We got into some weird wind situations. There was a dead zone near my part of the shore and the wind around it blew away from the shore, it took us an hour of tacking back and forth to get home, and we eventually broke out the oars as dinner time approached. No rain was in the forecast, so I left the mast up.


Today, I looked out on a perfect glass lake. It was dead calm. Leaving the mast up seemed to be a guaranteed method of wind reduction. The day wore on and around 2:30 in the afternoon, I saw tiny waves on the lake. The wind was picking up. I watched the wind and debated rigging the boat for about half an hour, then finally decided to go for it. I hauled the yard, the sails, the boom, rudder, the dagger board, and the ropes out of the boat house and down to the shore. I hoisted the sails, and tied the dozen or so knots.

The wind died again of course, as soon as I tied the last knot. My ability to control the weather though irony was not a comfort. At this point though I was determined. The lake wasn't completely glass like it had been earlier, even though there was no noticable wind. I put the oars in the boat and decided to try. If I ended up drifing around the middle of the lake and looking stupid, so be it.




This was my first solo trip sailing the PMD. Launching was a pain. I have no dock, so I have to puch to boat out, get in the boat, deploy the dagger board, and push down the rudder while managing the ropes. I pretty much immediately eneded up in my neighbor's cattails, but I pused myself out of them with an oar and into the open, but more or less still water, but then miracle of miracles, the boat was actually moving. The performance of the boat in light (almost non-existent) wind with just me and no passenger was amazing. It was actually moving, at maybe one or two knots, but still, given that there was no percievable wind to a dry human being, and that the tell tales were limp, I was just amazed. As I got out into the deeper waters of the middle of the lake the wind picked up just a little, and the manueverability was incredible. People are ok and all (sometimes) but 200lbs less ballast in your small wooden sail boat is a nice thing.