Sailing with my son

16 nautical miles

My son Tim is over for the summer. He has finished his degree and next year does his PGCE. I inveigled him out today for a sail. Unlike my older son who likes boats, Tim is more a landlubber and his summary of the day was 'boring' but than hastened to add boring was not that bad!

The first thing this morning was to repair the genoa. The previous owner of King Malu didn't do very good maintenance on her for the last few years and the genoa was one of the places he cut corners: The sacrificial cloth which should protect it from the sun had perished and he hadn't replaced it. This meant that the edge of the genoa is somewhat sun perished. The rest of the sail is fine. We have added sacrificial cloth, but this is now really part of the sail rather than an extra, in that it is holding the edge of the sail together! Anyhow... what this means is that there is a tendency for the edge to rip and need repairing, which is what we did first thing this morning.

We then went down to the marina. Tim (sailing Tim rather than son Tim) took her out and used the new bow thruster to nudge her out. We tacked south hoping to go over the Xenobia but couldn't get that close to the wind and so tacked round to the north. We then put up the gennaker/asymmetric spinnaker and sailed well, doing 5 knots in 7 knots of wind. Actually we seem to be sailing King Malu much better now, and the whole day we sailed close to 5 knots sometime touching over 6 knots. Tim said that it would be great to get that speed on a long passage, as we would get about 120 miles per day.

Tim (son Tim rather than sailing Tim) said that he really liked the bimini which gives a lot of shade and with the open sides the wind keeps us reasonably cool.

It was a great sail.

I took her back into the mooring and having the bow thruster gave me much more confidence: Because we needed steerage we had come it with enough speed for steerage and usually had to use significant reverse thrust to stop her in the berth. If we got it 100% right it was impressive. If we didn't (and this was much of the time) then we would have some sort of difficulty.

So with the bow thruster I brought the speed right down navigating around and knew I could turn her as I wanted to nudging her into place without having speed for steerage. She behaved exactly as I wanted and though Tim said I could have done it faster I prefer slower. King Malu accelerates slower than she decelerates, hence I much prefer to have her slow and nudge the speed up than to have to use reverse to slow her down. Anyway, I was very pleased with the berthing and it meant Tim just stepped off onto the floating dock and took the lines to moor her. Much easier than two weekends ago!