They let me fly the boat!!

So Sunday was really really freaking awesome. As some of you may know Dom's father is a huge sailing guy and could live on a boat for the rest of his days and Dom herself has spent almost half her life sailing.  I however had never set foot on a "boat" until last year when I went out on the lake in front of our friend Devon's house with his Pontoon boat... aka "The Floating Couch." And I had a blast where-in my favorite activity was when Dev would make it go round and round in circles.

Read more about my boating adventures below.


With the pontoon boat other than some cruising the main draw is you get to hang out,  enjoy a couple beers (allegedly, apparently it's not allowed) swim and lay around in the sun in comfort. It's not a terribly challenging activity but it's fantastically relaxing.

Earlier this week Dom got a call from here Dad about how he wanted to bring his boat from Spruce Run down to Maryland for this uber sweet mooring he got down there. Now in order to go sailing all he has to do is drive down, get in the dingy, hop onto the boat and go. Which saves tons of time per trip and makes it much more possible to go sailing for a weekend.
Naturally this means Dom asks me to come too. "Sure." I know just about nothing about sailing mechanics, and as a child in a fit of rage I ripped up my Klutz book on knots.... This should be an adventure. Naturally when I try new things it's new things like  foods, places, sports or something I've seen but never done before or upon skills I already have.
 The only "skills" related to sailing that I have are sitting, reading a gps, and a general good attitude. Oh yeah, I'm going to be in great shape, I can tread water for maybe 10 minutes if my life depends on it, and my swimming is abysmal.
"Sure"
The day starts out with us waking up killer early getting dressed and then scooping up Herbie and leaving her with Carolyn for the day. Naturally Herbie thinks that this is great as she'll get to play with Aiko (Carolyn's dog) and Andre (her son) all days. Carolyn is the fantastic friend of ours whom we got Herbie from and she is a life saver with being able to take Herbie when Dom and I need to run off for some reason or another.
I don't know about you guys but in my mind there were always 2 types of sailing, the ones on those teeny little kayak looking things where you're hanging half over it and your goal is to hit one million miles per hour.

Option 1

The other option is that you go sailing on a huge lazy yacht and just sip Mai Tai's all day. This is the kind of sailing you'll see in the movies a lot of the time.

Option 2

However as with all things you don't understand and have only seen in movies it's NEVER WHAT YOU EXPECT.

Now on to the boat. However "The Boat" doesn't really do it justice. It's a 24 footer with bathroom, kitchen, comfortable sleeping for 4, and some nice seating topside as well. Armed with my powerful google skills I found out that this kind of "mini yacht" (in my mind)  is usually classified as "Day Sailer".
After I got past my first impressions of the boat it was onto the work of actually getting her set up to to be taken from where we launched over to the marina where she'll be kept.

I have no idea what goes into doing any of this work but I'm pretty ok at following instructions. The nice thing about rigging the boat was that my primary job was to pull of ties and fold up covers that were being removed. I got to watch everything that was going on and while I understand it a bit I don't think I could re-produce any of it properly. We also had some great assistance from Moe. Moe happened to be a HUGE easily 90lb black lab that was the biggest dope ever. He swam away from his owners boat, came to shore and hung out with us. He didn't really like listening to his owner and despite all their attempts to lure him back he ended up finding a stick and playing the "I can't hear you" game. I'm so glad herbie is better behaved than that... and even when she's not she at least has the puppy excuse.

There were quite a few nifty inventions that Dom's father put together that really made the whole process painless. On the back of the boat you could raise the mast up from where it was resting. When you raised it that would allow you to hook it into a hinge like part. Then on the front there was a winch that had a 3 in wide 20ish foot "car towing strap" with a hook on the end. This was hooked to the mast and instead of having to heaving up a 25 foot? 500lb? mast with sheer brute strength. It wasn't "easy" but it went very very smoothly. I can't imagine having gotten it done without all of the inventions to make it very straight forward. The whole job took about 3 hours with me just doing simple tasks through out the time.
I always kind of thought that the sailing thing was finesse based, but wow was I wrong. Sure there's a lot of finesse but you gotta have some serious guns to back that up.
We get the boat done and line her up with the "launch bay" because lord knows I don't know its actual name. Dom's father puts on a nifty trailer extension so that he doesn't have to drown the truck to launch the boat. And we're ready. I got to be ever so helpful with this process and help guide the boat off the trailer. So after the trailer+boat is in the water you just make a quick wrap around the rope cleat on the dock and then the boat just slides off as the trailer is pulled back to shore.

Not quite.

You need to remember to unchain the boat from the trailer... otherwise it just gets stuck there and nearly rips the ropes from itself. So after fighting with the chain to get it unhooked from the boat we attempt this re-launch again. Success! Dom and I proceed to take the 2 land vehicles to the marina while her father motors the boat over there.  I'm in her car and she's taking her father's truck and trailer. after 6 lefts (literally) we were at the marina. We checked in bought some water and waited for no more than a few minutes before he showed up.
I got quite caught up just looking at all the boats around the marina and Dom's dad was finishing up paperwork while Dom was up to something.

Me just hanging out coiling rope on the boat.

Eventually we all get onto the boat and start underway. At this point Dom started spluttering sailing information all over me and it was just way way to much to even attempt to remember. About all I remember is that keep red things on your port side when leaving the bay, keep green things on your starboard. If you see the two liney things on the sail try and make them go parallel. When you switch tack the sail needs to switch sides.
Despite all of these things which I didn't know. They still let me fly the boat!!!! We only had the one "Jib Sail" up so we were putzing around (for them anyway, for me it seemed pretty quick) at 4ish knots.  Dom's father is completely fearless and asked me if I wanted to try steering. I asked if I'd break anything and they were going to help me out if i started doing anything terribly wrong.
Despite the fact that I've never done it before I apparently did quite well. I manage to get one side to lift up a good bit (which apparently means you're doing a good job of grabbing the wind) and it was a total blast to steer. I could feel the wind changing but I couldn't really tell how but managed to correct for it pretty ok. I only had one time where I didn't know what was going on and almost switched tack but Dom's father tossed his hand on the rudder and corrected.
It was so so so much fun I had this huge dopey grin just plastered to my face the whole time... and for a while after. It was an exhausting day though. So we headed back to shore. This meant Dom and her father would take the dinghy, attach it to the boat, get the boat all connected to the mooring then have to row the dinghy back. Naturally me being huge precluded me from coming along for this last quick journey so I stayed pleasantly on dry land. I was however manning Dom's camera in the hopes of getting a good picture of her careening into the water as she capsized the dinghy.
Sadly she has really good balance and there were no hilarious drowned rat pictures to be had. We got into the cars and ended up going to a diner that Dom and her father had been going to for years. It used to be the only one around but now it's surrounded by tons of other chain stores. The food was great though. I got the special which was 2 pounded chicken breasts with hollandaise, butter slathered broccoli, coleslaw and a chicken gumbo soup. Other than the sweet of the hollandaise and the paltry amount of rice in the gumbo it wasn't even a cheat meal.

I had so so so much fun going sailing. I am super super excited to do it again, it's going to be an absolute blast. I'll probably do a whole lot of reading and learning so that I'm not such a dead fish when it comes to being able to help out.