Friday August 1, the 8th day
Yesterday we sailed. Joined up with the rest of the crew, Greg and Joe Archambault, Greg is a friend from my sailing club in Sanford and Joe, his brother lives in Newport.
Mainsail, jib, screecher, spinnaker, everything seemed to work just fine. We left the mooring in the rain, in light air, and even lighter spirits. I have an awfully hard time being grumpy on that boat. Not to say that I won’t be irritated if you cleat the spinnaker sheet, or don’t get the halyard all the way up, but in general, 
my life on the Loose Cannon is good.
Between raindrops and drizzle and haze I kept an eye on the channel markers and distinctive landmarks, in case the bread crumbs thing didn’t work out, this is just the kind of place you might run up on a gingerbread house, and of course if there happened to be a wicked witch, I could be distracted.
Buzzards Bay is pretty good size, in the third cove down on the starboard side there was “Bird Tower” and behind that was the way to the Beverly Yacht Club in Sippican Harbor where Orion and I disagreed on precisely how many boats were moored but veritable plethora was acceptable to both of us as a realistic estimate of the total quantity. On the other side of the bay, a sizeable regatta was going on in Buccaneers, or 505’s or something about that size. We didn’t get close enough to see the insignia but did manage to be inside the race course before recognizing it. The wind was light so I decided we should stop, take down the main and hook the Halyard to the correct hole, have lunch and take a break before heading back. Check in for the BBR (Buzzards Bay Regatta) was between 4pm and 8:30pm at the yacht club and I did not know if my rating certificate issue had been taken care of so I wanted to be there early.
We got sailing again and went upwind to round a bell buoy then set the spinnaker. Having a big place to sail is sweet, we actually had time to adjust and observe changes to the spinnaker and the course in relation to the speed. On Lake Monroe it is easy to go fast with the chute, sheet in, hike out, get ready to jibe before you hit the seawall. This was different. We actually got to observe how to make the boat go somewhat downwind with the spinnaker and still go fast. Back and forth on a beam reach does not get you to the downwind mark in a competitive fashion. Fast is fun but fast in the right direction is extra special. I even got to play with the main enough to observe how easing the traveler but keeping the leech snug with the mainsheet seemed to help boat speed off the wind. I know, I know, this is fundamental stuff. I have only had this boat 8 years, it takes some of us a little longer than others. I still don’t know if any of the aforementioned technique is actually correct but… as we hit 18 knots on a really broad reach in what I would call 12 knots of breeze, I felt that there might be something to this. I guess we will get to test it a little bit today. As we headed back to the mooring we crossed paths with a sprint 750 headed out, I probably should know who it was but I heard a guy tell somebody, “that is the guy with the e-mail”. Thanks. I have been called a lot of things and the inoffensive ones are kind of nice sometimes.
-wb-