Sunday morning 9:12am Dec. 16th the last day of the Fall '07 season: Forecast Gale warning, nor'easter with winds in the 40's, coastal flooding, raining, sleeting, snowing cats and dogs, crappy roads, emails and phone calls arriving furiously at PRO headquarters, what to do? This was probably one of the harder calls I had to make all season, do we believe the forecast and call it off, cuddle up to a good book in front of the fireplace (both of which I do not have), or actually go sailing?
I could hear and feel the pain of RC for the day, why come out for the day when in most likelihood sailing will be canceled? Damned if you do, damned if you don't but we decided to go for it...
So I drove down early to the club at 9:45 to scope the scene, and it was bad. I rounded the corner to the club and through a driving sleet and fog saw the easterly driven frothing rollers between the club and Cockenoe island, definitely no sailing outside. But in the bay things looked good, smooth water, it would be high tide soon and the wind was only in the mid 20's.
By 11:00am a few sailors started showing up, probably more out of curiosity, but things were falling into place. Just enough RC was expected, the wind was moderating to the high teens, gusting mid twenties, and by noon it mellowed to the low teens! The only delay was getting 4 inches of ice off all RC boats.
Seven brave sailors and five RC volunteers in 3 skiffs (two operating, one towed out because the battery was frozen) went out to the middle of the Saugatuck Bay....
Read the rest of the story on the Cedar Point YC website...
3 comments:
As one of the very enthusiastic sailors that made it out last Sunday, I can honestly say the forecast was not nearly as bad as the weatherman predicted. Sure, most, if not all of us went for a swim. But I think I remember hearing somewhere that if I do not occasionally crash than I am sailing too conservative (and slow).
Anyway, everyone at CPYC wishes you would come visit again. Maybe son #2 can be persuaded to be the regular Tillerman family rep.
Yeah, you ought to work on son #2. He did sail a Laser a few times at CPYC one season. And now he is through with school and has a good job, he deserves to have some fun like immersing himself in ice-cold water every Sunday afternoon.
The TillerFleet though is now down to only two boats with TillerLaser #2 now being used by TillerSon #1.
Nice that the TillerFamily sails together. My older daughter sails with me a bit, but she is not such a fan of swimming in cold water. My younger daughter also sails with me, but it is hard to get her to stop playing with all the lines and stuff--basically, she likes to unrig the boat while we are sailing. And it is downright impossible to get her to sit still, which is very important in the (usually) light air we have in Arizona.
That is some story about the cold and windy sailing. We had a very slight touch of that today* so I made some excuse about not being able to work then loaded headed to the lake.
* cold in Phoenix means mid to high 50s. Water temps are in the high 50s to mid-60s I am guessing. Today's (relatively) high wind made it seem colder, especially after a screaming broad reach turned into an opportunity to inspect the bottom of my hull. It needs to be sanded.
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