Reefing the Sails on Book Knowledge
Our first sailing trip out alone, my dad and I, there was a notice of incoming weather … but did we listen? Not really. Honestly, we lucked out overall but seeing the potential weather coming in around us was enough to make me change my tune about the marine weather forecast.
We left it was a beautiful day, sun was shining and moderate winds. Since we knew the winds would be picking up I did put on the smaller jib sail in preparation. The first hour of sailing was absolutely fantastic, and then as we approached the Corpus Christi Bay area we could feel the increase of wind gusts from the loss of land protection. I will say that it was a blast at first, the sails filling up and feeling the boat lung forward with the increase in pull. But after about another hour the gusts were creeping up to 30+mph and we had WAY too much sail … not to mention we began to see 3 different storm cells coming together all headed for our location.
Where was our foul weather gear? In the storage shed of course!
Oh well, no time to fret it was time to teach myself how to reef down the mainsail. Who say’s book knowledge is useless in the field? (that would have been my dad), well I’m here to tell you it did help. I at least knew that it was possible and that the sail was equipped with the eyelets and hooks all I had to do was get to the sail and make it happen.
I had dad point the boat in to the wind to release the pressure against the sails and then lowered the sail to the reefing point and set the hook at the mast, as I made it down the boom to tie down the sail the wind caught the boat and pulled her around. That was scary!! Dad attempts to point her back into the wind, I don’t have much time but I am able to get a moderate tie down done but it isn’t pretty.
It works, but I brought my sailing mentor out the next day to rig up the in-boom reefing system for next time. Check back and I’ll pull together some video, pics and overview of how that system works on this boat.
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Emily
