Sailing a new boat is a mega adjustment
Issue 98: Sept/Oct 2014
Sehnsucht is a German word for yearning and intensely missing something or someone. Standing on the deck of Mystic, our C&C 30, not long ago I had a profound feeling of longing for the boat we know. This is the boat Jerry and I have sailed since 1992. This is the boat we understand. We know what she can do and what she can’t do. We know where every line goes and what it does. We work together as a team of three: the two of us and Mystic. She has brought us home safely through some very challenging conditions.
But this is the boat we left on stands for the summer while we sailed Sunflower, the C&C Mega 30 that has been our project boat for 11 years and was launched for the first time in late June. Standing on Mystic’s flat deck where everything is familiar and comforting — particularly after a few weekends with the novelty of sailing her lightweight younger sister — filled me with Sehnsucht. We have so many wonderful memories of our adventures with Mystic. We’ve been to destinations all over Lake Superior uncountable times. We’ve been to Lake Huron’s North Channel and back. We’ve spent three months aboard doing a full circumnavigation of Lake Superior. The trouble is that the sailing, the scenery, and the challenges were all getting so very . . . predictable.
With the launch of Sunflower we have certainly fixed that! We pushed the reset button and started all over again. We may as well be brand-new sailors. While Mystic is a sturdy coastal cruiser and competent Lake Superior boat, Sunflower is going to help us discover smaller lakes in the U.S. and Canada. Her trailerability is her charm and she sails well on just a breath of wind — as we have already discovered to our great delight.
But there is a flip side to every coin and we are still coming to grips with the reality of sailing a much lighter boat. We need to relearn the weather signals that tell us when to reef and which sails to put up as we leave the marina. We need to be much more alert to changing conditions. This is a much more complicated boat. We need to become more confident (or is it more competent?) with Sunflower’s lines and systems. All her lines are led to the cockpit, leaving us with a jumble of lines to choose from: main halyard, self-tacking-jib halyard, genoa halyard, two sets of reef lines (fore and aft), boom vang, sheets for the genoa and another line for the self-tacking jib, mainsheet (a highpower/low-power tackle arrangement), a backstay tensioner (never had one of those before), and running backstays (ditto). Notice, please, that I didn’t even mention a spinnaker. I don’t want to hear about that. She has five winches on the cabintop and two more on the cockpit coaming. I stand uselessly with a blank expression looking at the rope clutch system while pondering which halyard is the one that will raise or lower this sail or that one. I’m dumbfounded by the reefing system. The knowledge of which line to pull does not come automatically. No habits are ingrained. It’s all new. We have started all over again.
One day we sailed with full main and the 150 genoa moving us along at nearly 4.5 knots on wind so light that Mystic would have been dead in the water. It was magical and thrilling. We tacked up a narrow channel and there was so little load on the sail that I was able to run the sheets on very small cabintop winches.
The next day the wind picked up with gusts that intimidated a couple of brand-new sailors who can’t remember what’s where fast enough to release this or drop that. We managed to take it all down in a flurry of flapping canvas and head back to the marina under power to think about the lessons learned, to prepare better for the next sail, and to settle our nerves.
The word I used that day to describe a couple of not-so-cocky sailors was “re-humbled.” I expect Sunflower will humble us frequently as we get to know her and learn to sail her, but our skills are bound to improve with time.
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