Tuesday 26 April 2011

A couple of buckets


Just our luck, first chance to sail  this  year at Morcambe with John from our bay sea school courses and when we arrive it's almost flat calm. Little ripples say it's 1 on that Beauford scale thingy. John reckons theres enough wind though to sail  Lilly which is a 22ft Jeanneau.
Great to be back on the water though even if it's only just enough breeze to move the boat, but once away from the mooring bouy it's surpising how we have enough way to do a bit of practice tacking. Besides me and Jackie there's a guy called Danny who's coming back to sailing after a couple of years away.  It's the first time we've been out sailing with John, even though we've done all our shorebased courses with him. He's just been awarded Best instructor for Scot sail in 2010, and I'm sure he deserves it, he's very patient, and you never feel you've asked too dumb a question. This is a couple of hours sail and in that time we learned some more about the nuances of sail trimming. We then did some practice on sailing up to our mooring with a 1 to 2 knot tide running. This involved chucking a couple of buckets out of the back to act as brakes, very informative. We did this a few times, could come in useful. I really feel we've come a long long way since we knew nothing, and it was good to be back sailing, and so good to do it with John Parlane, I think we'll do another couple of these before we take off with a flotilla in Kefelonia in September on a 32 footer, moving on up towards our 36, and all by ourselves, no more novices, but of course still a lot of learning to do.

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