(At least we got to see a beautiful sunset!)
August 29 was my sister's birthday! Happy belated birthday lil sis! Since her birthday fell on a Monday, she asked that we take her sailing on Sunday, August 28. Earlier that week, we thought we might have to cancel because of Hurricane Irene, but Miss Irene ended up going North instead and so the sailing was back on.
My sister and her boyfriend and two friends arrived around noon, so that we could get our sailboat out of the slip while the tide was still pretty high (At low tide, our boat sits in the silt on the bottom). We were planning on surprising my sister by sailing to Fort Caroline, an old fort just brimming over with history (My sister loves history)...but about 2 hours in, Ryan informs us that it would probably take us another 2 hours to reach Fort Caroline, putting us there at around 4-5 pm and not home until 8-9 or even 10 pm. (They had a 2.5 hour trip back to Orlando after the trip ended).....so we all decided that it'd probably be safer to turn around, so we'd be able to take our time getting back to the dock.
We turned around and sailed back towards the curve in the channel (Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that we were in a part of the river that is used by commercial freight boat things?) that we had just passed. Since the wind was blowing towards us, we had to turn to the left (tack) once we reached the far right side of the channel. As we turned to the left, to make the most of the wind, the current pulled us right back to where we had started. Awesome. Since we lost our propeller on the gas motor, we were using a trolling motor that ran off of a battery charged from our solar panel. This motor was so quiet and eco-friendly, we were in hippie heaven until we realized that it is good for maneuvering around our dock but not so much for going against strong currents. We tried changing to a bigger jib (sail that goes on the front of the boat, not the main sail) for more power and we were just about to make it around the corner when a GIANT freight boat (I have no idea what they're called, but they're the size of a cruise ship and blast an ear splitting horn at you if you happen to be in their way) came up and made it very clear, via ear splitting horn, that we needed to move and...lose all the ground we had just made.
This all went on for about 2 hours, with spurts of almost crashing into the rocks on the shore, cursing, one of the little cable thingies that keep the mast from crashing down and killing everyone came undone, more cursing and Brandy's famous "Sailing Induced Nervous Breakdown" (ex: I hate this boat!! We are selling it when we get home!!!) before a really nice couple pulled up in their motor boat and offered to tow us out of the current. They ended up towing us for a good hour to make sure we didn't get stuck again and brought us right up to where our dock is. Thank God for nice people!!
The moral of the story is this: test your boat in the safety of the river to learn all about the kinks and terrible things that can happen. Better to learn them in the river than in the ocean...which is what we were planning to do the following weekend. Thanks to this slight hiccup, we decided to postpone our first venture into the ocean, which could have been a real nightmare.
You know, as this entire day was happening I was thinking "I hope my sister and her friends are prepared to be riverpeople now because we may never leave the St. Johns" but I was also thinking this: "I can't wait to blog about this so other new sailors can avoid our mistakes!"....but now I'm starting to think that making mistakes and learning from them is all part of the sailing experience. We can't possibly plan for every bump in the road! So now, my philosophy is this: once you get your sailboat, do not bring people on it that do not have experience sailing OR if they don't have experience, they don't mind when you get stuck in the river for 2 hours, the propeller falls off, etc.
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