photo credit: John Picken

We learned a number of things:

• The racing main isn’t be best night sail.  It’s trickier to hoist and drop which add a little extra element of danger Justin and I probably didn’t need.  That and it’s gray.  If it not for the nav lights, we were the stealth boat.
• Boat lights closer to shore are tremendously hard to distinguish from the normal clutter of lights in the loop.  Is that a boat or a biker?
• Ditto for channel marking lights — when they exist.  We spent the last half of our sail aiming for the Monroe’s south entrance only to find out when we got there, we had been aiming at traffic lights.  Slipping through the south entrance at night is something we may pass on in the future.

Next week is probably the last week for sailing before we pull Waterloo out for the year. More night adventures to come.

We left early and were out of the harbor by 10ish and we made our way northeast towards the water intake off Belmont.  We had the newer main up for the first time and we’re pretty happy with it.  Unlike the older main, the racing main threads up the entire length of the mast and is loose on the bottom.  The older main has slides along the mast and threads the length of the boom.  I went below to grab a headsail.

The wind was fairly light and the older genoa was sitting in my dining room, so I grabbed what I thought was the bigger of the two racing sails.  It felt heavier, but we’d learn shortly that it was thicker, not larger.  Josh and I raised it while Chris kept us moving.  With the jib up, we got past the northern, red-striped inlet pretty quickly.

photo credit: nautical2k

After a few beers and we had changed course to head home, I suggested we try again with the sails.  “Let’s raise the big one.”

“I’ll help,” Chris said.  Josh said he’d steer.

After some careful folding and rolling and some less careful unfolding and unrolling, the big genoa was up. But it wasn’t up enough.  The thing was bigger than expected and took up more of the forestay than our other sails.  I dropped it slightly, pulled a few links out of our shackle chain that secured the tack, and yanked the halyard up the last 8 inches again.  Tight in the front, we turned to other matters.

“Let’s see how far into the wind we can point,” Chris said.

We sheeted everything in and Josh piloted us into the wind.  We had the windex registering in irons before we had to fall off.  “That’s pretty good,” Chris observed.

However, having a sail almost twice as big as your main billowing out along one side almost touching the deck doesn’t lend itself to great visibility for the helmsman.  This noted, we did a better job watching for others on the way in as we finished off the beer supply.  The gentlemanly sail was a success.