Winter Sailing Report

I dragged myself out of a warm bed this morning after too much wine last night.  It was cold and grey and silent.  My body isn't too sore from yesterday's mileage, but there is a generalized laziness and some stiffness in my shoulders and my hip flexors.  The idea of sitting around or dozing is unusually compelling.  Instead I put on running tights, fleece pants, a t-shirt, a polypro top, and a fleece pullover.  I covered my feet in two pairs of SmartWool socks.  Fleece glove liners, waterproof shell gloves.  Hat.  Hot cider in a thermos.  It was about twenty degrees when I got into the car.  I drove a few minutes away to the marina where we sail in the wintertime. 

I was one of the first people to arrive and for a few minutes I sat in my car with the heated seats on, half hoping nobody else would show so I could go back to bed.  But thirteen people straggled to the parking lot and the breeze started to pick up.   We launched three Ynglings and a motorboat in a fairly short time.  We drysail these boats, which means each sailing session we need to trailer the boats to a big crane, and then, amidst lots of shouting and directing and pulling on ropes, lift the boat up on the crane, spin it out over the water, and lower it into the water.  It's not terribly hard, but there are invariably two or three people who want to be the boss of the proceedings and I've learned to take the job of operating the crane and to shut my mouth.  I used to chime in and instruct people until about five years ago it dawned on me that doing my job well and shutting my mouth would reduce the noise and improve the efficiency of the whole operation.

We had three races, maybe four.  After an hour or two the sun broke through the clouds and the day warmed up considerably -- up to 40 degrees or more.  I skippered the first race.  One of the guys in my boat was from Denmark and the other spoke Danish, so they taught me Danish words for boat parts, especially where they sound dirty (e.g. "jib" is "fok").  We got a lousy start but ended up sneaking up on the leaders downwind and passing them just before the finish line.  It was the only race I drove.  We got a second in the next race, partly because of my fumbling job on the foredeck. 
Winter sailing is cumbersome, because you are wearing so many layers that you can't move smoothly around on the boat.  You don't really know where your body ends, so you catch your sleeve or your hood or your collar on boat parts.  My hat kept getting tangled in the boom.  And my gloves didn't give my fingers the manual dexterity to do things well -- jibing the spinnaker took much longer than it needed to.  Buried in all those layers, only my cheeks could feel variations in the windspeed or direction.  My lifejacket made me clumsy and oafish when I moved across the boat.  It's still fun, of course, but you can't perform as well as you expect to.

My toes got very, very cold as the day went on and I switched into the motorboat to tend to them.  I took off one of the pairs of socks and massaged my toes, and put my boots on with only one pair of socks underneath.  It's counter intuitive but often true that you can be too cold in too many layers, and that to warm up you may need to remove a layer.  With both pairs of socks, my feet were jammed too tightly into my boots and my circulation was blocked.   

We're supposed to get a big snowstorm this evening.  While I watch the snow fall I will take extra pleasure in the fact that I spent the morning sailing. 

Comments

[Nicole]

Great descriptions, it's cold here today, I can't imagine sailing. But it's often the things that make you get out of bed early that make the day so special. I haven't been sailing in years, thanks for sharing your trip.

[Jack Jones]

Sometimes on cold mornings I too have difficulty jibbing my spinnaker.

[Jack Jones]

I'm not one of those guys who always has to top the other guy's story but you don't know what bone chilling cold is untill you've spent a winter where I live. I won't say where it is exactly, but I used to have this middle aged Russian lady who was supposed to clean my house occasionally (she rarely did) anyway, her and her daughter -- also from Russia -- always stayed home whenever we had a bad cold spell. They said that the winters in Moscow were nothing compared to our winters.