Shilsholed

Went out with Andy and Serge tonight for the 1st of the 5 Ballard Cup series on Andy’s Thunderbird “Rev”. We got bullied by some bigger boats but it was fun… perfect weather.

The sea lions seemed thrilled – cheered us on the whole time.

Jim Hall told me that there was more Puget Sound Keeper info in Latitude 48 this month. If you’re interested it’s pages 14-15

Temps in the 40’s, pretty windy (25?), gray skies, occasional rain.

Looks like they either had a very, very short J-24 race or called it due to weather. It’s the J-24 North American Nationals this week with the top 4 boats going to Buenos Aires, Argentina for the World Championships.

Andy and I were on his Thunderbird, a light, 70’s racer. Plans were to go head-to-head with Casey on his Thunderbird and tune against each other to prep for the five week Ballard Cup series starting on Monday. The idea being that whoever is in the lead doesn’t tweak anything until the other boat passes, the trailing boat always trying to tune their boat to pass the other.

That was the plan… Casey didn’t have crew, making the two boats pretty badly matched. The weather was pretty crazy and cold. I’m not sure Andy learned much about tuning. I learned more about his boat though – so it was good for me. Casey did a pretty kick ass job single handing.

Didn’t hit the showers until 10:30pm… long, but fun.

-ben
K-dock

We left Saturday morning, early, to take Bryan’s 83′ foot two masted stay-sail schooner up to Port Angeles where he was going to pull out. Pretty uneventful motor out of the Sound in very light winds.

While exiting Admiratly Inlet we were passed by some sort of nuclear sub. Huge waste of money these things, but very cool looking…

About 18 miles from Port Angeles the wind started to pick up. It was dead on our nose but we decided to sail for bit since it was still early. Stella doesn’t really go up wind. She sails about 50-60 degrees to windward at best and is a brute to tack.

The wind continued to build along with the seas. Most of us were getting or feeling sick and we were taking continuos waves over the boat. After one tack and about 3 hours we’d made about 4 miles to windward. It was great sailing but we weren’t going to get to Port Angeles tacking up wind in 30 mph winds and 8 foot, short frequency, breaking waves.

We started up the engine and nothing really happened. The engine was running, but we weren’t going anywhere. For some reason the feathering prop that had got us out of the Sound was no longer doing anything.

We tacked again, heading out towards Victoria as the seas and wind continued to build. People were getting tired. 2-3 hours later, after tacking again we were back at about the same place, 13 miles south of Port Angeles.

We decided to give up on Port Angeles and run south. We surfed for an hour or so, some thrilling sailing, until the wind died off right outside Port Townsend.

We started up the engine again, but still no speed.

We more or less drifted with the current south towards Seattle. Making it back to Shilshole around 8am.

Long 24 hours but some great sailing on Stella. She’s really something when the rails in the water.