Bristol-Blue Lake Michigan Sailing Adventures

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 channe...

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 ...

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 easie...

Getting ready for the Venitian festival fireworks we pulled out the cushions and sat back and relaxed.  Hammock up too.

Biminis, preventing sun stroke on the water since. ...  times forgotten.  This week we have taken one step more towards cruising boat and one step away from racing boat. The recent heatwave has us thinking it's a long way out a sunny channel to get into the lake and it is not too shady out on Lake Michigan.  So, there are a few ways to go about this Bimini business. You can go the custom route get the parts, bend the tubing or have someone do this for you.  Can you say cha-ching, because the local canvas guy can see you coming.  Yeah, that's not the way I went. After much measuring and figuring, I decided to visit Amazon.com and find a prefab kit and modify from there.  I went with a 3 rib system that is 8ft wide by 6ft long.  8 by 8 would cover the entire cockpit but the mainsheet would interfere so there will be a 2ft area uncovered at the front of the cockpit perhaps someday I'll install a dodger to cover it as well.  Once I wrestl...

So many people have asked why did you not go with a bigger boat.  The answer always comes back to money. We want to do some traveling and as a teacher and civil servant, we have a limited budget.  Last week we got the chance to do some of that traveling.  We went out to San Fransisco, California rented an RV and drove 850 miles in a week. We visited the Redwoods and Sequoias, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Sonoma for a little wine tasting. To finish up the week BB and Myles took to the San Fransisco Bay for some whale watching and I got the opportunity to ride along on   USA AC-76   <click through to the link if you are in San Fran.  The trip is totally worth it.   76 is the hull number for this American Cup Class Racing Yacht .  It measures in at 86 feet in length with a 12-foot beam and a 14 ft draft.  The boat has been outfitted for day charters so there are some stanchions and safety features added along with a motor...

Over the past few weeks, I've been reading about sail design and trim. I've been reading about loose footed mains and decided to give it a try.  Many sails are designed with a bolt rope in the bottom that holds the sail to the boom along the entire length. From what I have been reading this turns out to be a bit of holdover from the old cotton sail days wear ripping and tearing were an issue. Modern Dacron does not need this additional support and a lot of sailmakers are going to loose footed sails. The easiest way to try this out on your boat is to simply remove the bolt rope from your boom and see how it goes.   On the Mirage 24, I have been very impressed with the results so far.  Sail handling is much easier especially with regards to tensioning and loosening the outhaul. You can really tune your sails foil shape and so far I can not find a single reason not to do this.  Here is a nice video of us sailing along at 6K loose footed main  ...