Divine Lunacy

My out of country Aunt (Africa), her out of state daughter, and my out of state second cousin all flew in on Tuesday. They usually only make it up here once a year, so it’s a pretty big deal. (I guess it will be twice this year.) As a celebration type of thing, they took my Grandma out to eat yesterday. There was room for everyone except me. Even my brother went. :(, I suggested that they give me a ride home, so I could pick up the truck, but apparently they were rushed for time. The baby (second cousin, who is old enough to talk) has to eat at the same time everyday. They agreed to bring something home for me. That was nice of them, but they’re lucky I’m not spoiled like that baby. I had lunch around 1400, which seems kind of late… I wonder if I could have gotten away with saying that I need to eat lunch at the same time everyday…

When I finally finished lunch, I ran off to attempt to drown myself. Last year, sailing didn’t seem to be a very blog worthy topic. I went sailing every chance I got last year, but I’ve only been twice this year. The weather yesterday was like gnarly dude…(uh..yeah.). I was out for about for hours, and only flipped once, which leads me to the point of this whole paragraph. I actually flipped three times, but only one of them was an accident. The wind was blowing from the South, and I had to go North to get back… Naturally, the ride was quite fast… a little too fast. The rudder on my 30+year-old sailboat decides to ‘pop out’ sometimes. Unluckily for me, this happend when I was sailing right next to a jet ski lane that borders a VERY rocky area. When the rudder popped out, I completely lost control of the boat. All the slack that was then in the rope somehow managed to wrap itself around a buoy three times. The boat didn’t really care, it just wanted to keep going, so it did, but I wasn’t in control. In order to fix everything, I had to flip the boat. While I was busy untangling the buoy, the boat began to flip all the way over, such that the bottom of the boat would be horizontal. The sails on these boats are pretty much water tight, so righting a boat with a water-logged sail can be challenging. I was lucky and managed to finish with the buoy before my situation got any worse. I righted the boat and was ready to sail away when I noticed that the boom was pointing straight up into the air. For those of you who don’t know, the boom is the pole on the bottom of the sail. During normal operation, the boom is perpendicular to the mast, not parallel. I decided to flip the boat before it flipped on it’s own. The people who watch and laugh can never tell the difference, but it makes me feel better anyway. Although the boat was lying in the water waiting for the sail to be unwrapped, my predicament was far from over. If I had left the centerboard to unwrap the sail, the sail would have filled up like a bucket and sank… I needed help from someone, but who? Being a Boy Scout, I’m always careful to follow the buddy system. (ah..sometimes..) My brother was in a kayak not too far away from me—or so I thought. He got tired and decided to rest about two hundred yards back. So there I was: Sitting on a half overturned sailboat waving my arms frantically to get his attention. He finally noticed me, and rushed to the scene, only to stop and ask me what was wrong when he was fifty feet away. I’ve had my suspicions about him, but they were realized that day: my brother is an idiot.(oh, hi Jeff!). I would think that upon seeing the boat, he would instantly realize what was wrong. I’ve been sailing for years. I can right the boat in a number of seconds after flipping.(providing everything is normal) He should have realized that. I yelled at him for stopping, so he he quickly hurried along. By the time he had arrived, I had explained my problem to him. All he had left to do was solve it. His solution: float around in the Kayak while I sit there and wait. Again I yelled at him, and again he rushed to my rescue, and again, did nothing. I yelled at him some more, this time explaining in detail how to lift up the end of the sail and throw it over the mast. That went surprisingly well and I had the boat back upright in no time. I was ready to sail off when I noticed that the sail had done a 360 around the mast. The wind was too strong for me to just pull the sail back to the other side. I had to use the wind to turn the sail… I began turning the boat and again yelled at my brother for just sitting there. He came to my rescue by pushing the boat in the wrong direction. I pretty much gave up on him after that. The whole thing took between ten and fifteen minutes.

Congratulations to Steve Lafaille for passing his Eagle Scout board of review! yay!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 2232:00 and is filed under Scouting, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.