Sailing Haro Strait in March

I was going to post about how fucked up (and ironic) it is that the Minister of Finance (the branch that collects taxes for things like PST) doesn’t accept cash as a form of payment and then I was going to write about how, for the first time in 15 years, I decided to give a bank the chance to have me as a customer and when I went to see them, they were so busy tripping over themselves telling me about how I could get secured loans to build credit through them but they couldn’t cash a paycheck every 2 weeks without holding it for 8 working days because I don’t have “existing credit” (I am pretty sure that in my world of right and wrong, the guy WRITING the cheque is the one who should be scrutinized, not the person who’s been given a cheque in lieu of cash) that I eventually told them to stuff it, I will keep my cash in…

Oh. NM, looks like I did just write about it.

I was actually here to post sailing pics, because that is waaaay more interesting. I went sailing on March 7th (solo) and got Scotch Mist beating to windward at 5.9 knots which was TOTALLY rad. I really love my little boat more and more each time I take her to the ocean. She is a forgiving vessel, so she sails well with very little effort which makes me look all that much better when all the sailing club guys go by with their fancy boats and crews of 4 or 5 on deck…

Yesterday (the 14th of March), with 22kn-34kn of wind in the forecast I knew I HAD to go out so I could try my staysail with a reefed main, and Wendy was sporting a sailing trip too, so she joined me at 8:30am and off we went.

We hardly passed Graham rock and we were in the wind and could set the sails and reach south. Not long after, we had sailed to the south side of Haro Strait and were almost at the mouth of Sidney Channel when we decided to change tacks and head northward.

Wendy at the helm piloting us northward!

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We had achieved 6.3kn (the boat has a practical hull speed of about 6.5kn) which was pretty kick ass!

The wind was probably about 12-15kn but that was to be the last of the pushing. The Low we were expecting had stalled, (yeah, weather decides to stop sometimes and take a breather) so we were sitting in less than 10 kn of wind beating at 2-3kn northward toward Sidney Spit. We saw a couple of windward tacks take us to 4kn but mostly it was relaxing out there.

It was a great day all in all because I was sailing. We performed some tacks, some jibes we sailed off the wind, we ran (albeit slowly) under Genoa alone for a bit, and we even put the boat into irons and then successfully pulled out of irons in short order.

Wendy was the helms(wo)man for the majority of the trip (and she owes me pictures yet) which was fine by me as I was able to spend much time with the wind and the sails. I don’t have any instrumentation beyond a fishfinder and a hand-held GPS, so I need to “feel” the wind and the water in order to sail well. Not having to pay attention to the course 100% of the time allowed me to sharpen that sense a bit. I trimmed the sails in , and played with the sheets until I was just about backwinding the main, but pointing relatively high, so we were making optimum way on our courses.

Anyways, we sailed 15.4nm in about 5.5 hours. Well, an hour was leaving and returning to the marina), and it was an awesome day overall…