sailing casita

Has it really been 3 weeks since my last post!? Most of my “free” time lately has been spent studying for the CPJE (plus the weather here in PDX has been very UNspringlike) but I have spent a little time on the boat.

Last weekend we motored the boat (mast is still not up) from our temporary slip at the boat yard moorage to a marina about 6 miles down river.

It would have been a nice trip except for the weather, we had a pretty cold rain most of the way.

Getting her out of the slip at the yard moorage was interesting. Our slip was perpendicular to the current and to get out we had to get the stern to swing upstream. It was pretty tight maneuvering (it felt like it anyway), we had a little under 1 boat length of room behind us and a boat in the slip next to us on the downstream side. First we tried to back out with rudder to port (upstream) with me at the helm and Devon on the dock with bowline to prevent the bowsprit from getting too close to our neighbor. That didn’t work, the boat just went straight back and we didn’t have enough room to clear the neighbor to turn downstream. We tried a few times but could not get the stern to swing upstream. What finally worked was having Devon pull on the stern line from the dock to get the stern to swing upstream (he also had the bowline to prevent us from hitting the neighbor) while I backed out with rudder to port. At least we didn’t have a big audience (I guess the bad weather was good for something).

Devon and I both took our first stab at splicing, it wasn’t nearly as hard as we thought it would be:

And Devon replaced a missing section of lifeline. We were missing a portion of our port lifeline, about 6 feet plus the gate (if you look closely in the photo of me at the helm you can see where the lifeline is missing). Devon brought the corresponding starboard pieces in to West Marine and duplicated them. He purchased the parts and used their swaging tools to assemble it. It came to ~$130, I guess they are pretty proud of their parts!