So far, my sailing has been pretty much basic stuff - learning how to get Laelia moving well, practicing tacking and gybing, etc. Today I wanted to start working on some of the things I will need to know when I get out on the ocean and things start getting a bit rough.
I got started about 11:30 - plenty of time to get out to The Slot before conditions get interesting. There was a fair breeze blowing when I got to the place where I usually start hoisting sails.
One of the things I often hear when I tell another sailor I have a ketch is "when the wind picks up you can just drop the main and sail with the mizzen (the little sail toward the back of the boat) and the jib". That's what I tried first. It works well except that having that little sail at the back of the boat makes Laelia try hard to turn into the wind. I can deal with it by using the rudder to keep it from turning into the wind. I briefly saw 3.5 knots under jib and jigger (the other name for the mizzen) and then the wind went away.
I could see wind lines farther out on the bay so I started up the engine and motored out to where the wind was blowing.
The wind was blowing pretty good in The Slot, 10 - 15 knots. That got Laelia moving again at about 4 knots. Great! Next, I wanted to try heaving to under jib and mizzen. Yes, I've heard the jokes about heaving to!
Heaving to is a maneuver that is used when it is getting too windy and rough to keep sailing up wind but you don't want to lose too much ground by turning around and letting the wind blow the boat down wind. It is done by tacking but not letting the jib come across the boat to the other side. That means the wind pushes the jib against the boat and acts like a big air brake. In the picture, you can see the mizzen toward the left. It is being blown to port. The jib is plastered against the shroud with the wind blowing against it instead of along it. It stays there because the sheet (the rope) at the lower right is holding it there. The steering wheel is turned all the way to the right to try to keep Laelia pointed into the wind.
It didn't work quite as I would like. I think that partly it was because I have a lot of the jib unfurled. If I would roll some more of it up and make it smaller, it would help. I'll try it next time. As it was, Laelia slowly drifted downwind and gradually turned so she was pointing downwind. If I had left her alone she would have gybed and we would be off and sailing on the other tack. Not quite what I wanted.
I decided to try hoisting the main with one reef in it. That means that I didn't put all of the sail up - just the top 3/4 of it. The rest of it stayed bunched up along the main boom at the bottom. Having the main up generates more turning force and I hoped Laelia would turn more into the wind and stop trying to get sailing again. That was a bit better but I think I need to try all of this with less of the jib deployed. It would also help to not have the mizzen up.
With all of the sail work, I was up and moving around a lot. Suddenly, I felt that feeling I knew all too well from my early sailing days - queasiness and dry mouth. The heaving too experiments were about to turn into just plain heaving.
I gave up on the experimenting and headed out toward the Golden Gate again. Sitting at the wheel and looking off toward the horizon got the symptoms under control. It was a reminder that I need to get some more sea time under my belt before I head off shore - unless I want to spend a week being seasick like I did when I sailed to Hawaii.
Now we were on the wind (sailing up wind). When Laelia is hard on the wind, the air flowing off the main pushes on the back side of the mizzen (backwinds the mizzen) and the mizzen doesn't help Laelia go faster. Besides that, the trailing edge of the mizzen flutters. It is annoying to listen to and it is hard on the sail cloth. I dropped the mizzen. Laelia was quite happy now. With the main reefed and the mizzen stowed, she was doing 5 knots.
Two tacks and I was getting close to the bridge. The wind was coming in directly off the Pacific and there was a pretty good swell running. I watched another sailboat about a mile away to try to determine how high the waves were. The top of the boat's cabin nearly disappeared when they were at the bottom of the swell so I'm guessing the waves were about four feet from crest to trough.
It started to get rough enough that there was a lot of crashing and banging as Laelia cut into the waves. Spray started flying the length of the boat. I hadn't put on foul weather gear and I didn't really care for getting wet so I turned around and headed back to Sausalito.
As soon as I turned down wind, it was a different world. Now I was going with the wind so it didn't seem to be blowing as hard. I was going with the waves so they weren't throwing up spray. They weren't going a whole lot faster than Laelia. Under these conditions, Laelia did what most sailboats do - she rolled a lot.
The sail back was pretty uneventful. I lost the wind before I got to the Spinnaker Restaurant where I usually drop the sails. That meant a boring 20 minutes under power before I was back to my slip.
All in all, it was a very satisfying sail. I learned some more about how Laelia handles. I have more things to try next time I am out. Nothing broke. What more can I ask for?
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