Thursday night we got out of the airport quickly and made it down to the boat a little after 2300. This is a new record for us and should be jotted down in some book or something. The boat was waiting for us in a slip at the end of the dock, air conditioning turned on and clean as a whistle (thanks John). We got up late on Friday and had breakfast at this little dive in town that only took cash and then doubled our bill when we returned with the money to pay up. Small town hospitality. We met up with John Hellwege at the boat and went over all the systems and then took her out for a quick sail and explanation of how things operated. Mostly we concentrated on how to maneuver under power. That evening we got cleaned up, put on some nice duds and went out to eat a celebration meal. We tried a place we hadn't been to before, Osprey Point Inn, and managed to time our arrival just as a major thunderstorm blew through. We had to sit in the car and wait for it to let up a bit and I still managed to get soaked by the time I got to the door. It was worth getting soaked. Both our meals were beautifully presented and outragiously delicious. Total taste sensation. It was the perfect thing to send us on our way.
Saturday morning we woke up to overcast skies and 25 knot winds blowing out of the North. After a quick breakfast at the local coffee shop we cast off our lines and immediately ran into trouble. The wind was at just the right angle to prevent us from bringing the bow around as we pulled out. Gratitude Marina is pretty compact and the lane between slips is probably only 50' across which doesn't leave much room for a 45' boat. The wind was blowing a constant 25 knots, gusting to 35, and no matter what I tried I couldn't get the bow around to starboard. We started getting blown down the lane towards land and all I could picture was the headlines in the local paper about the fool who took out 5 other boats before running up onto the rocks. Not getting anywhere with traditional methods I let the bow get blown around to port and decided to try backing out. We had to make a tight turn at the fuel dock and head out directly into the wind but backing out went very nicely even if it did look kinda odd. There was a yute from Gratitude giving us a hand with the lines and I'm sure he thought I was a complete idiot. That's OK. We got out, didn't cause any damage or sink any boats. Not how I had envisioned starting out though.
We powered out across the mouth of the Chester River before unfurling the mainsail. After cutting the engine we came up to speed under sail and averaged better than 9.5 knots over land. This was with only the mainsail up. Now, "speed over land" includes any help you might get from the tide but let me tell you, we were hauling ass! When we got a little further out we unfurled the genoa and headed for the Bay Bridge on a beam reach (Points of Sail), sailing comfortably at 10.5 knots. There were white caps on the bay and the wind continued to blow strong until we got down towards the bridge, where it eased up for a while, dropping as low as 15 knots. After slipping under the bridge we came to a new course that took us through the mooring field for ships waiting to get into Baltimore Harbor. We cut in between 5 very large tankers as we headed South to Thomas Point Light. Here the wind picked up again and we hit our maximum speed for the day at 11.4 knots. As we headed down the Bay the wind continued to shift to the West so we never had to adjust the sails and maintained sailing on a broad reach. This is a very comfortable way to sail and involves very little heeling over, the wind is mostly with you so you're not getting your hat blown off all the time and the waves tend to come from behind at a slight angle giving a pleasant roll to the boat as they pass under.We sailed past our old stomping grounds of the West River and Eastern Bay and as we got down towards the Choptank River we came about and sailed into the wind to line up on the entrance into Herring Bay. This new course had us sailing close hauled and was definitely Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. We were heeled over about 15 or 20 degrees and crashing through the waves. We ran for a short time with reduced sail before finally succumbing to the need for comfort. We furled the sails, fired up the engine and headed into Herring Bay.
La Vida Dulce only has basic wind, depth and speed instruments (as well as a compass), which is enough to get you where you want to go as long as you have charts, which we do. Sailing in unfamiliar water requires that you keep a lookout for channel markers and things on shore that are noted on the charts, like radio towers and water or oil tanks. Many people use GPS and chart plotters to let them know where they are with an accuracy of 3 meters. Dead reckoning is a form of navigation where you start in a known position and calculate where you are based on your previous position using the speed of your vessel and elapsed time. Accuracy here can be pretty good (see the story of Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty fame) or off by 100's of miles (see Christopher Columbus - he thought he was in India). The type of navigation I depend on mostly is called dead luck and is based on familiarity with your surroundings, crossed fingers and hunches. It's usually dead-on accurate but I find we sometimes run aground. Of course this won't serve us well out in the real world so we plan to add electronics such as GPS, radar and chartplotters for navigation as we get closer to our time of departure. Cheri and I also plan to take courses together on celestial navigation, diesel engine repair and whatever else looks like it would help us to be better and more independant sailors.
This is a good place to comment on the performance of the boat. Since I was a kid I've sailed on a wide range of boats from my Dad's 1.5 man dinghy to the 90' schooner Alma. Each had it's own personality and each required different levels of input to make them go. The Alma was the worst, required huge amounts of muscle and behaved like a barge. Of course, she was a barge, but now I'm getting off the story. My parents had a string of boats, the nicest of which was a 36' Dickerson ketch. This thing handled nicely, was comfortable and traditional which gave you a huge sense of pride just in being aboard her. She was a fun boat, good memories. Cheri and I had a 28' Islander that served as our training platform. She was a good boat but at 7,000 lbs. displacement was fairly light and with a fin keel behaved like a bucking bronco. Fun but tiring. La Vida Dulce weighs in at 30,000 lbs and has a full keel. She drives like an M1A2-Abrams tank. She's big and heavy but surprisingly agile and fast. There are some tricks to handling the sails because of the cutter rig but I think we'll become better at this as time goes on. She's a real delight to sail. The kind of wind we had on Saturday would have had our Islander, Delirious, heeled over at 30 degrees, rail in the water and you'd be fighting to keep her on course. After two hours you'd be exhausted. The Island Packet heeled over less, required little effort to steer and went where you pointed her. She sailed with total dignity. We bought this boat based mostly on her layout down below and her reputation as a cruiser. I can see now that she's much more than we had hoped for. This is a quality boat that's designed to handle well and be fun to sail. She's comfortable both down below and topsides. Her design is well thought out and timeless and should keep us smiling for years to come.
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