A night with Quest: Sailor Talk #2
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Sailor Talk #2 was a night of story sharing among SEAS members and talk about an Atlantic adventure.
The floor was opened for the skippers in attendance to tell a story about how they got into sailing. Joel Osburn, Sean Boily, Mike Rentel, Chris Miller, James Bibb, Jim Green & Earnest Eckerson all shared stories on how they got started. A familiar theme ran in each story: a curiosity for moving on the water with only wind as your engine.
We then viewed a short video on Raceboat Crewing, focusing only on the Bowman's duties. This DVD is available for checkout by SEAS members, along with several other instructional books & DVD's in the SEAS library. The boat was a typical club racing sloop and they went through setting up the boat prior to leaving the dock, maintaining the bow watch on the starting line, simple tacking of the headsail, and more complicated sail changes and spinnaker sets. In the end, they offered several trade secrets that veteran bowmen use to improve their efficiency of movement & handling of duties.
Following up on the racing theme was Sean Boily, Race Committee Chair, promoting the Admiralty Island Rally (AIR) with a photo slideshow of past AIR races and discussion of each leg of the Rally. Finally, he discussed the entry requirements and how the Club always comes through to lend safety gear to help a skipper meet PIYA safety standards. If anyone's interested in participating in AIR, please contact Sean at smb.architect@gci.net.
The centerpiece of this Sailor Talk was the presentation, second in a 3-part series, by Chris & Louise Miller on their Atlantic Crossing. This presentation included the trip from Antigua to Long Island and back to Granada. The slide show was well orchestrated with subtitles and background music appropriate to the locale (reggae in the Caribbean, Frank Sinatra in New York, Jimmy Buffett in the Southern US coast). They spoke of great hospitality between cruisers and locals wherever they went in the Caribbean. They would find their anchorages at each new harbor by noting the color of the water: blue was deeper than 50' while green was typically less than 20'. Their typical anchorages were in 10' of water, and they showed us a picture where tied up to a dock they grounded out with at least 6-inches of height between the bottom paint on the hull & the water surface. In the shallow waters of the caribbean, it's not if you'll ground out on the shallow sea floor, but when!
Their journey in the summer of '06-'07 took them to the East Coast & southern coastal waters of the US. They showed us a buoy in the Hudson River that was partially submerged due to strong currents. They were amazed to find that the Hudson had a consistent current of 6-7 knots during peak flow. Sailing by the Statue of Liberty was the highlight for Louise. They journeyed through the Intracoastal Waterway, explored the Chesapeake Bay, all the way down the coast of Florida and up into the Outer Banks of North Carolina, before heading back to the sunny islands for the winter.
Their return trip was as part of a fleet of 75 cruising/racing boats in the Caribbean 1500. Not more than 100 miles off the east coast, they were out of the trades and the wind died. They motored about 90% of the remaining 1400 miles to the finish in Tortola, BVI. The rest of the winter they spent cruising south to the Grenadine Islands. We look forward to Part 3 of their journey, the passage through the Panama Canal to Bora Bora, then Hawaii & finally north to Alaska!