Sailing Lessons: Basic Keel Boat (ASA101)
For years I’ve wanted to learn how to sail. I like boating but I thought sailing always had an appeal because not only does it give you something to do besides pilot the boat, but the boats performance lies in your hands.
It was a ton of fun. After a half day of classroom work, Carol and I went out on a J-24 sailboat with one other group of two plus a captain / instructor. We each took turns doing all the basics sailing upwind, across the wind and of course downwind. You can’t ever sail directly into the wind but you can come pretty dang close and that’s the most exciting because it feels like your moving really fast and the boat can “heel” or lean over because of the force of the wind against the main sail. At the same time, you want to avoid sailing directly downwind as well because the boom that the main sail on swings back and forth and a small change in wind direction can make it swing wildly across to the other side and hit someone.
One of the most exciting things happened on the second day. We were going to be on the boat all day practicing anything we wanted. Carol was taking us out of the marina. I thought it would be fun to do a man overboard maneuver. It’s somewhat complicated to do, especially since you don’t have a motor on the boat. You also have to be fairly precise because you have to bring the boat up extremely close to the person in the water so that you can haul them in. They won’t be able to climb in themselves.
Well I threw the big bumper we had been using for the maneuver overboard. Carol didn’t know ahead of time that I was going to do that so it caught her off guard. In perfect form though, she performed the maneuver perfectly and we retrieved the bumper.
The real surprise was when just after pulling up the bumper her hat flew off and we had to do it again! The trickier thing is that the hat is super hard to spot in the water and especially hard to track while she is performing the maneuver. She still pulled it off in one try so all hail Capt’n Carol!
