I had mentioned before (in passing) that my wife was pregnant. Well, now she isn’t pregnant. Samuel Hyrum Earl was born just before midnight on May 20th. It was a pretty exciting day. KaeLynn had an emergency C-section and everything. On the bright side Sam is here now, and everyone is safe, and I have an even deeper respect for modern medicine. That particular hospital stay was worth every penny.
However, having a new baby has seriously cut into my sailing time. I hadn’t been out on the water a single time in June, and June is the middle of the sailing season. Fortunately, KaeLynn really wanted to get out of town, so she took the kids that weren’t at one sort of camp or another up to her parents. That meant that Tuesday (June 23rd) after work I was able to get out on Nephi’s Courage.
Like always there were some hiccups. For one thing, I forgot to turn on the GPS until after I already got out on the water. My track actually starts in the northwest corner of that picture, and then I worked back towards the beach. Still, I was able to get GPS data for most of the trip. I covered 3.27 miles in 72 minutes. Top speed was 5.72 MPH average was 2.71 MPH.
The fun bit was that the wind was blowing 15-20 MPH and the chop was big enough that it just was starting to break (2+ feet). A Puddle Duck in those conditions is a pretty bouncy ride. It was quite a bit of fun. I am still getting used to the extreme stability of the boat. In any other small sailboat that I have ever sailed I probably would have been at least thinking about reefing. In the PDRacer, however, I didn’t even have to sit on the side air boxes, much less hike out. I had to bail a bit from all of the spray that got thrown over the bow, but Nephi’s Courage handled the conditions with ease. The mast partner support even kept most of the water that cave over the deck from getting into the cockpit.
Not everything worked perfectly though. I really need to do something about the cleats that I have attached to the mast for the main halyard and the topping lift. They catch the jib sheet on just about every tack. I am not sure what I was thinking when I put them there.