#leeboard

[oledavyjones]

Dutch fishing vessel with the characteristic leeboards. Not too much canvas here.  At first I thought the engine might be on. But that isn’t so: They are at anchor, which also explains why nobody’s at the helm.

[sailingvesselstrider]

10th august 2014 -

part 1

i’ve invited two of my coworkers, Phoebe and Treebeard, to come sail (or rather, teach me to sail) this sunday at noon. we meet at the parking lot for oaks bottom wildlife refuge on milwaukie avenue in southeast portland, and walk down the trail about 20 minutes to the willamette river- no dock or beach, in fact we have to depart the trail and lug bags, oars, and selves down a somewhat treacherous muddy cliff to silverfish, my salt bay skiff.

silverfish comfortably accommodates three people with gear, and rowing to strider takes about 5 minutes. Phoebe and Treebeard are suitably impressed as we pass my neighbors aboard Victory and Sun Princess and the floatilla to the north, whom i’m not familiar with yet, and enter what i now think of as “my” channel. the ospreys fly around overhead, and all seems relatively hopeful.

aboard strider, gear stowed inside, litterbox, cat food, and water put away, i haul out the sails so that Phoebe can see what we’re working with. it turns out that none of us has much idea what to do with what we’ve got. Phoebe and Treebeard’s experience is with “sunfish,” tiny racing sailboats with the standard bermudan (high aspect ratio triangular) rig. strider’s rig is very nearly as far from that as possible: two 17 foot sprits holding a nearly square sail on a short mast.

well, we figure out which side of the sail attaches to the mast (it clips on, which requires me to climb the mast to get the top ones), and we row out to open willamette, figuring we’ll have the sail up in a few minutes. we don’t. in fact, it’s 2 o’clock before we’re actually sailing- we foundered and tied and untied things and stuck sprits in odd places and even dropped anchor right in the middle of the willamette so we wouldn’t float away before we figured anything out for about an hour and a half, my neighbors watching us with politely contained amusement.

suddenly, the sail and sprits are up, Phoebe scrambles to attach a sheet (line) to the bottom sprit, and i have to haul the anchor up while strider quickly picks up speed. we can’t turn at first, a very frustrating situation in a sailboat on a river, until i remember to drop the leeboards and rudder, at which point there is wind in our faces along with shared silly grins.

the shenanigans of our first voyage continue in part 2.