It’s not hard, mostly because this boat is so nicely set up to sail. I had visions of us all running around deck, all the time, moving ropes around, messing with sails, doing sailing things. Maybe on some sailboats. Maybe on old sailboats. This sailboat is controlled largely from one point just in front of the helm:
See the ropes and the spindles they’re wrapped around? That’s where the action takes place. You hoist and lower the mainsail, furl and unfurl the jib sail and tack the jib sail from right there. It’s all about pulling in or letting out the ropes.
This is a closer view. Two people stand here. The left position controls letting out the needed rope in a controlled fashion. When the captain tells us to prepare to tack, we get ready. The cleat holding the line steady is released. Then, when the captain says, “tack”, the left line is played out while the line on the right spindle is pulled in.
The right spindle pulls in the line under power. When you’re trying to move a sail into the wind you don’t have the strength to control the rope by hand. You can’t overpower wind that’s moving a forty-four foot boat through the water. There is a black button at the very right side of the picture. That controls the right-most spindle. While your partner is playing out line, you’re pulling in under power.
There are variations on that process depending on what sail you’re working with and what you’re doing with that sail, but that’s pretty much it. For each sailing maneuver, you change up which ropes are on the spindles, depending on what you want to do. Excess rope drops into the basket below the spindles. The majority of sailing tasks are controlled primarily from this one point. Pretty cool, right?
There are two sails on this boat. The jib sail, when not being used, is wound up around its pole. Here’s a picture of the bottom of the jib sail. See the black line coming out of the spool at the bottom? That line goes around and up to the control area where you can unroll it, roll it back up. There are two more ropes not visible here that are used to move the sail left or right (or tack) in order to maximize the wind hitting the sail, which makes the boat move more quickly through the water, which is what sailing’s all about.
Unrelated to sailing, here’s the trampoline. It’s pretty bouncy. There’s nothing but water directly below it. It’s a fun spot to hang out any time, even at night, looking up at the stars.
Back to sailing. This is the mainsail. We’re anchored this morning so my picture of the sail is in its stowed position. It’s in a zippered bag. When you put the sail up, see the picture below shows where the sail goes. From the control point, the appropriate rope is put on the right spindle and then the button is pushed to pull the heavy sail up the mast. When it’s time to put the mainsail away, you do the reverse. For this you do need extra hands to stow and un-stow the sail from its bag. Standing on the very top of the boat wrangling a sail into a bag is fairly invigorating.
Today we’ll be heading back to St. Thomas. We’re finishing up food and supplies, pulling the luggage out of the hold it’s been stored in for the duration we’ve been on board and get to packing this evening. Knowing me, I’ll start packing earlier.
The Big Boy Update: My son wanted an app for his iPad because Andrew has it. It was large to download and then it had eleven more downloadable files once we launched the game for the first time. I had a hard time getting him to understand that we don’t have much data to use on our cellular plan while here. He offered to delete apps on his iPad to make room, told me we could get on wifi and that wouldn’t cost anything and that we could use Andrew's data plan maybe? He was trying so hard to come up with a way to be able to play the game. It requires an active connection to play so we told him he’d have to wait until the airport tomorrow when we had connectivity via their WiFi.
This morning he came over excitedly and showed me how he’s been playing the game. There is this thing Apple does to be nice: if you connect one device of yours via a hotspot you make available on your phone, you get the bonus feature of all your devices connecting through your phone—whether you want them to or not. I explained to him he could play, but as soon as I was done with this blog post, his connection was going with it. It does look like a cute game. I told him I’d have to download it and play with him when we got back to the US and had unlimited data
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My best friend got us the Harry Potter audio books for the trip. My daughter hasn’t been interested until yesterday, when I got her to try it just for a bit. She didn’t want to listen to the first book on account of they’ve seen that movie multiple times so she started with the second book. She became engrossed, finishing The Chamber of Secrets and starting on The Prisoner of Azkaban after dinner. It was very sweet though when she came to find me when she got to a scary part at the end and asked if I’d listen to it with her. We ended up playing the book out on Andrews speaker and everyone got into listening for a while before bed.
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