Here are few of our more exciting (not in a good way) sailing/boat adventures. We'll update soon with more stories...
Feb 8, 2012
We had quite the exciting morning. The wind was blowing really loudly in the morning, so I got out of bed to make sure everything was ok. It then started raining and I was just turning on the instruments panel to check the wind speed, when I saw a giant flash of white. One of our huge white cockpit cushions had flown overboard and was quickly going downwind towards the cruise ship anchored here in the Cabo bay. I yelled at Chris to get up and we lowered the dingy and put the outboard motor on it. He then zoomed to the cushion quickly and another little port boat followed him yelling at him to stay 200 m away from the cruise ship. He luckily could grap the cushion and then motored back to Starship. We were so close to loosing our cushion and learned a valuable lesson of never leaving anything on deck overnight that is not tied down (no matter how calm it is when you go to bed).
Feb 10, 2012
Chris and I have had quite the exciting 16 hours. We were having a great sail yesterday and decided to try and make it to Los Frailes. When we were 8 miles past the San Jose del Cabo marina, the wind died so we turned on the engine. As the sun was setting the propellor suddenly stopped rotating. We thought we had hit something and then quickly realized that our spinnaker had come loose off of the deck and was caught on the prop. We lowered the dingy and were able to get the spinnaker off of our rudder and partially on the boat. So the good news was that we could sail/steer, even though we couldn't start the engine....So we decided to sail back towards the marina and hove to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaving_to) outside of the entrance until the sun rose. We then made a plan to dock in the marina under sail. Tacking up in the channel was working well until we realized that the tide was ebbing and we were making little to no progress towards the dock with the fluky winds in the marine, so we gybed and got out of there. We then anchored under sail in a near by cove and a boat from the marina towed us to the dock. Chris had luckily just been reading about free diving so he was able to free the spinnaker from our propellor using his diving skills and our snorkel gear. The propellor and motor are fine and spinnaker is torn, but is reparable.
We've learned a lot from this experience, the main thing being to never leave a huge sail bag on deck, no matter how well secured it is. I was also very happy about our heaving-to, sailing into the marina attempt, anchoring under sail and chris' diving skills. These last few hours have been more exciting than I've wanted, but I'm very happy with how the 2 of us handled the mini crisis on Starship.
Feb 8, 2012
We had quite the exciting morning. The wind was blowing really loudly in the morning, so I got out of bed to make sure everything was ok. It then started raining and I was just turning on the instruments panel to check the wind speed, when I saw a giant flash of white. One of our huge white cockpit cushions had flown overboard and was quickly going downwind towards the cruise ship anchored here in the Cabo bay. I yelled at Chris to get up and we lowered the dingy and put the outboard motor on it. He then zoomed to the cushion quickly and another little port boat followed him yelling at him to stay 200 m away from the cruise ship. He luckily could grap the cushion and then motored back to Starship. We were so close to loosing our cushion and learned a valuable lesson of never leaving anything on deck overnight that is not tied down (no matter how calm it is when you go to bed).
Feb 10, 2012
Chris and I have had quite the exciting 16 hours. We were having a great sail yesterday and decided to try and make it to Los Frailes. When we were 8 miles past the San Jose del Cabo marina, the wind died so we turned on the engine. As the sun was setting the propellor suddenly stopped rotating. We thought we had hit something and then quickly realized that our spinnaker had come loose off of the deck and was caught on the prop. We lowered the dingy and were able to get the spinnaker off of our rudder and partially on the boat. So the good news was that we could sail/steer, even though we couldn't start the engine....So we decided to sail back towards the marina and hove to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaving_to) outside of the entrance until the sun rose. We then made a plan to dock in the marina under sail. Tacking up in the channel was working well until we realized that the tide was ebbing and we were making little to no progress towards the dock with the fluky winds in the marine, so we gybed and got out of there. We then anchored under sail in a near by cove and a boat from the marina towed us to the dock. Chris had luckily just been reading about free diving so he was able to free the spinnaker from our propellor using his diving skills and our snorkel gear. The propellor and motor are fine and spinnaker is torn, but is reparable.
We've learned a lot from this experience, the main thing being to never leave a huge sail bag on deck, no matter how well secured it is. I was also very happy about our heaving-to, sailing into the marina attempt, anchoring under sail and chris' diving skills. These last few hours have been more exciting than I've wanted, but I'm very happy with how the 2 of us handled the mini crisis on Starship.
Location:
San Jose Del Cabo
Latitude:
23.0606
Longitude:
-109.67278
intense! glad you to hear you guys managed to recover everything!
ReplyDeleteGreat story! You guys will be vets when all this is over. I hope you find a good sail repair shop over there. That whole Puddle Jump thing still sounds scary though. Is that going to happen this spring?
ReplyDelete