Sailing on Lake Marion - Day 2

Day two started with a beautiful sunrise. I made some coffee with the JetBoil french press and got going. Still no rudder but the wind had shifted a little and lightened up some so it wasn't hard to get out and get going. Mainly steering by my position on the boat occasionally hanging over the side to get it to turn windward. Without a rudder I had a lot of lee helm which was a hassle. After a nice long close hauled reach trying to steer through the stumps to the deeper water on the other side I got into a weird situation where I could not get the boat pointed. I finally rolled up the genoa and that helped balance things out although I did lose some speed. After a couple wasted tacks going nowhere, I got it settled into a nice groove and managed to get a couple good long tacks and then got a nice wind shift headed back to get up to the bridge.

The one long tack from Vance back across the lake looked like this and was the best part of the day. Note the lack of a tiller. I just sat with my back on the cabin occasionally leaning a little left or right to adjust my heading. The engine there became just for show since it wouldn't run after a bit, just started leaking gas. I was guessing that the float in the carb got stuck or some such. I am definitely going back to the trolling motor because it has been nothing but trouble.

I was ghosting my way under the bridge close hauled and just about through the second span when a gust of wind came up and grabbed the front of the boat, smashing the bow. Yay. Got a pretty good bit of damage to a spot that had already been repaired once prior to me, so now I get to repair it again for real. Slightly ironic in that I have a rub rail I am working on that will look nice ad would have been great protection for that but oh well. On the other side of the bridge the winds got flukey which are a real pain to deal with when you are steering by jumping around the boat. I did get a good wind for a while but I started figuring that it was going to be tight making it to the landing by dark and if the wind died I wasn;t going to make it. So I bailed out at a boat ramp with a nice beach next to it. Tied the boat off and got to enjoy a nice 8 mile run back to my car. Well I probably ran about 6 of it and walked 2, took me about an hour and 15 minutes or so. Well I did want to get some exercise this weekend.

All in all, it was quite an adventure. What is it they say, "It's not an adventure until something goes wrong." I was happy that despite all the setbacks the boat did get me back home in one piece and I learned quite a bit about the boat and how to sail it. I'd actually sail Lake Marion again. It was a nice wide lake, the camping was beautiful and there were plenty of spots to camp. The cypress trees are vary nice. I'd launch closer to 95 to avoid the hairy sections and try to generally stick to the south side where the main channel is (the blue line in the google earth pic above) to avoid the hazards.

The rest of my pictures are up on picasaweb at https://picasaweb.google.com/110586701752725030552/LakeMarion

Sailing on Lake Marion - Day 1

So I decided I would head down to Lake Marion in SC this weekend just to sail somewhere different. My local lake, Lake Norman is relatively narrow so the winds can be flukey. Plus I figured I would make a weekend of it and camp out on an island somewhere. Turned into quite the adventure, but I learned a lot about my boat and gained a few new skills. Plus any trip where you wake up to this view can't be all bad, right?

So here is a view of the google earth track. Navionics is a great little application (Lakes East is what I have), but I have heard the new version is not as good.

   There was a lot of wind, white caps on the lake, but overall not too bad. Probably should not have chosen to launch on the lee shore at a place called Stump Hole Landing though! It lived up to its name with a lot of stumps and in fact the whole lake has good stretches of stumps as well as cypress trees popping up. There was one lonely little tree right out in the middle of the lake. Considered changing my plans to come from the north side of the lake which would have made more sense. But I got out, had a great downwind run making over 4 knots with just the genoa out (the roller furler worked well although I need a longer reefing line!).
  I made it under 95 and got greedy and tried to hoist the mainsail. Well the new tiller tamer had been working great except that my tiller moves up and down so when I am not holding it it basically falls down and locks the tiller. So when I moved forward and was pulling the main up a good gust of wind came up, pushed the boat out of the wind and caught the sail. When the boat heeled over, I heard the crack of the rudder. The wind was pushing me hard into the shore for a while until I got things situated.
  So I got to to learn how to sail for the next 7 miles by playing with sail trim. I was losing light since I got a late start playing with things around the house, so I decided to hit a nice harbor I saw on the charts and just managed to glide up to a great little island and get everything on the shore and my tent set up in the last bit of light. I had a nice little spot and the Newport floated out in about 8 inches of water. Great sandy spot for my tent, sheltered from the wind and I slept like a baby, except at one point when my forearms got tight (from holding the sheets for two hours steering along) and I woke up with my hand asleep.

But again, got a perfect spot to camp and had a great night.

New Gear Winch, Mainsheet Routing, Tiller Tamer and the death of a Rudder

So I installed a new gear winch for the swing keel, which works well. The only drawback at this point is that it takes too many turns to lift. I will end up wrapping 'something' around the cable drum to increase the diameter which will reduce the number of turns. I may also get real crazy and install some type of electric motor to drive it which would be a nice bonus. Getting rid of the thwart really opens up the cockpit. And it also works well as a drink holder!

Here you can see where I ran the mainsheet and now run it to the end of the boom. Not entirely happy with it but I wanted to go out this weekend and wanted to get it working. Basically cleat it under the tiller. Please disregard how dirty the cockpit is, still need to clean and paint it.

I also managed to put together a tiller tamer out of part of an old broken desk chair that I saved the wheel adjuster for. I tend to look at something like that and say 'that could be good for something' and in this case it paid off.

However, stay tuned for the next bit where the tiller tamer combined with some good wind gusts and a little bit of stupidity led to this, the remains of my rudder: