Went out to the lake today and my oldest son, Andrew [18], met me after school. All the stars finally aligned and made it possible for him to come out for a sail! Andrew’s never been on a sailboat, so I showed him around a bit, gave him a safety briefing and we took off. Before he got to the marina, I made sure the motor was going to start since there were some problems [see this post] the last time we had all planned to go. But thankfully, all was well this time. The outboard started right up without a hitch.

It was fairly good sailing weather today. It was overcast, about mid-60’s Fahrenheit and 6-7 mph wind. We had a couple of good gusts that were in the 18-20 mph range. Those times the gusts came, we were close hauled and heeled over, only about 15 degrees, but it got Andrew pretty excited about sailing. He said he didn’t like the heel, but the huge smile on his face told the truth!

The first half of the sail, we were mainly on a broad reach point of sail and there wasn’t much excitement, but I did snap a couple good photos of Andrew. It was great to be able to sail, relax and have a few good re-connecting talks. He did very well, handling the jibsheets during tacking and even manned the tiller for a while. At one point he looked at me and said he’d really like to do more sailing and even asked about living aboard a sailboat! ๐Ÿ™‚ Looks like we might just have another sailor in the family.

Here’s a few pictures and stats for this outing.

Andrew at the tiller

Andrew at the tiller

At ease....

At ease….

 

Wonder what's on his mind right now...

Wonder what’s on his mind right now…

Our stats for the outing

Our stats for the outing

It got dark on our way back into the harbor, so about the last 25 minutes and the docking were done without the sun. This was actually my first time to sail at night and navigate into the dock at night. At least I remembered to turn on the running lights when dusk arrived. I need to troubleshoot and repair the steaming light [and anchoring light for that matter], so I didn’t have the steaming light on when the sun went down. My first nav light rule broken [oops], and hopefully my last.

Mike