Northwoods Woman

Rick bought this sailboat about 8 years ago.  While he had initially done some work on it, he had never taken it out in the water.

The poor thing laid out in back of the garage and gathered grime while critters stored acorns in the hull.

We’ll never get those out.

So Rick had decided that Monday would be the day to see if it was seaworthy.

Or lakeworthy, as our case is up in the Northwoods.

But first, we had to figure out how to rig the mast.  And believe me when I tell you that there is no copy of an owner’s manual anyway on the interwebs.  ANYWHERE.  I know, I looked.  And looked.  And when I was done, I looked some more.  Finally, I came upon a sight that had pictures of this type of boat and delved back to the ones in the 1980’s where I estimated this boat originated from.  (I only got that time period from the gazillion non-manual websites that I came upon that even mentioned this type of boat.)

We’re good with visuals, so we pieced a few of them together and got the general concept and crossed our fingers that it would work.

So off to the beach with a boat landing we went.  Of course there were tons of people there to witness this event, being a holiday and all.  And you can bet that plenty of them knew Rick.  This was going to be interesting.

And not, I did not participate on the first excursion.  I figured that having one person figure out the general workings of this boat was better than 2 of us fumbling around, cursing, and generally paving the way for divorce court was not my idea of fun.  Plus, if he tipped it, I didn’t want to be involved with the water part.

The lake was a little down, so he had to tow it out to deeper water in order to attach the rudder and keel.  It probably didn’t hurt to get past all the swimmers too.

Alley oop!

And away we go!  It was the perfect conditions for learning about how to run this thing.  The wind wasn’t very strong, but he didn’t need a lot to get that thing cruising.

And then it happened.  The wind caught the sail and he didn’t get the craft leveled out in time and ended up in the drink.  I guess the boat wanted to show him who was boss.

But when you fall off a horse, you have to get right back in the saddle.

Before I knew it, he was sailing that thing as if he had been doing it for years.

There was still a scare…

…or two, but he kept her upright.  I may or may not have had to suppress a gasp a time or two.

After about 40 minutes, he decided to come ashore, and even had some kids giving him help.

He was happy with his adventure, and I’m sure that we’ll be taking many more trips to the lake so he can master his art of sailing.

This little guy even came buy to congratulate Rick on a job well done.

Or maybe he was just looking for his stash of acorns.