Bristol-Blue Lake Michigan Sailing Adventures

Spinnaker Socks are super nice for launching and recovering your spinnaker.  My last two boats have had them and after using one the benefits are clear. 1st off, sail handling is much easier especially if you're short-handed. 2nd, safety spinnaker socks let you launch and recover your spinnaker without everything being perfectly packed in a turtle bag another word fewer things to tangle up keeps it safer. Woodstock does not have one so we have not used the Spinnaker yet and our trip to Lake Mac last week would have been the ideal time to use a Spinnaker.  So it is time to look into this.  $17.00 per foot x 28 ft =$476 plus tax.  Hum lets go see what's in the garage.  Any past readers remember this old post Boom Tent   Well this is one sewing project that didn't work out. However, I still have the material sitting here on a shelf and it is light enough and long enough to make into a sock. Now just to find one of those fancy fiberglass hoops they use to make these things

This morning we ate breakfast at the dock and set out around 9:30 which means by the time we got to the lake it was around 10 AM.  The wind was just starting to build in real slowly this morning. It was blowing straight from the south. We sailed up the wind northwest and then back to the northeast.  It would have been an amazing spinnaker run.  However, I decided to error on the side of caution. With just me and the kiddo aboard I didn't want to do a spinnaker set on this boat for the 1st time on my own.  We made it to Lake Macatawa around 1:00 in the afternoon.  Did I mention it was not very breezy?   6.4 knots was our max speed and we averaged 4.5. It was a great day out on the lake and we made it back to Tower  by 4 PM.  Here we are hanging out on the foredeck while the tiller clutch does the driving.  In this picture, you can just see the caution marks for the dredge operation going on at the mouth of the channel.  This prompted us to keep a wide berth as

Aside from sailing blogs, here's what's been on my sailing related bookshelf these past few months. By the Way of the Wind and Swell are both interesting books. These ocean-going sailors have great experiences to share in their books.  Jim Moore and his newly married wife set off for the South Pacific in their hand-built boat and travel around the world.  It is quite a story set in the early 70's and ending in the early 80's. The book ends with them setting off from Hawaii on another sailing adventure. While it was a great story, it refers to many political occurrences that occurred before my time and while important seem trivial in many ways today.  There are a lot of descriptions of the weather and it can be a bit long at times. Reading this confirmed my desire to be a Great Lake sailor more than ever.  The length of time it takes to passages across oceans is just something I'd rather not do. Swell by Liz Clark is another story altogether.  Liz Clar

Not all things lost go to Davy Jones Locker.  This week I lost a halyard up the mast while I was taking some measurements. This thought occurred to me. What do you call a halyard stuck up at the top of your mast swinging around?  Perhaps a Jack Sparrow?  That guy is always swinging around from something in the movies.  There are several different ways to retrieve a lost halyard everything from fishing lines to running some sort of device to snag the line up another halyard. Most of these methods look to require quite a good bit of patience and time. The most straight forward way is to break out the bosun's chair and go up and get it.   Seems it is the spinnaker halyard and it is above and outside all the other halyards I decided to just go with the bosun's chair. It has been a while since I've been up a mast. This time I decided to make things a bit easier on myself and my wife down below by building an easy climber. Besides making the mast easier to climb I felt