Yesterday (July 1, 2015) we took the young men and young women of our ward to Deer Creek Reservoir to goof around in the lake there.  We borrowed a three small plastic kayaks from Brother Barsdorf and I took my mouse boat and PDRacer.  We threw all of this gear in the back of the scout trailer, and hooked it up to my big Dodge Van.  We then loaded the van up to the gills (12 passengers plus me driving) and headed for the dam.  We took two other mini vans as well.  Since you have to pay $10 per vehicle it was critical that we take as few vehicles as possible.

Brother Howard took stuff to make home made root beer, and grill hamburgers, but I didn’t really get involved in that.  I love root beer, but I love sailing even more.

Somehow I broke my gunter “jaws” loading the spars into the trailer.  I am not sure how this happened, but I am saving the fix for an article of its own.  When I rigged the boat I simply tied the bottom of the gunter to the mast.    This didn’t allow the gunter to lie flat against the boom when the sail was lowered, but the rigging fix worked acceptably well other than that.

Like always it took me a bit to get the boat rigged up, and I don’t have any pictures or GPS tracks.  It is amazing how much extra work it is to take kids with you, especially if they do the bulk of the actual sailing.  I had my GPS and a camera, I just didn’t have the extra bandwidth to try and take any pictures or actually turn on the GPS.

The kids had fun though.  I did maroon Sasha and Miles out on an island for a bit.  They wanted to get out of the boat on the island, and then they wouldn’t get back in.  So I told them that I would be back after them.  Miles, of course, decided that he wanted to swim back.  Luckily he was wearing a life jacket.  He isn’t a strong enough swimmer to make it back.  He assures me that he wasn’t in distress when I rowed back out to get him (the wind had died).  However, I clearly saw the look of relief when I pulled him into the boat.

As always, the trailer failed on the way home.  Part of the metal sheathing started to delaminate and it was flapping in the wind.  No one died, and the trailer did make it home eventually.