On the way out of the Harbour we tacked back and forth off Balmain so my partner could take a few photos from the ferry wharf (see below) then we waved goodbye to her and set off towards the sea.
The trip was very relaxed until on the way back through the heads one of my crew said, are we going to put the spinnaker up? Having never tried the spinnaker on Sea Monkey, I gave a non-committal answer, and explained that I had all the rigging on board, but I had never put anything in place. For the next 10 minutes we set about getting all the sheets and blocks in place, and then somehow we were at the point of no return.
To put this in context ... I have always worked as the forward deck hand, so I do know how to rig, launch and retrieve a spinnaker, but I have always relied on a skipper and crew that know what to do to make my job easier. My crew on Sunday were much less experienced, and only one had done spinnaker work before, plus they had no interest in taking the helm.
The next thing we knew, the big blue white and yellow kite was flying beautifully and we took off like a scalded cat down the Harbour back towards Bradley's Head. We had the sheets running through a second set of blocks alongside the jib sheets and then up to the cabin top winches. I had realised that without cam cleats we were going to have to use the horn cleats which was less than ideal. I knew we would have to gybe sooner or later and as I was going through the plan it dawned on me that the cockpit winches were now not being used as we had dropped the jib (still not sure why we didn't just furl it!!!). We brought the sheets back to the cockpit winches ,cleated off and had a great run round Bradley's Head before we decided to play safe and drop the spinnaker whilst we had plenty of room. The spinnaker was dropped neatly, straight into the front hatch and the relieved crew cracked open a beer and relaxed whilst we had a nice downwind sail back towards our mooring.
The only excitement on the way back was when I turned to the crew and said, "look at that goose on the RIB, doesn't he know that waving your hands over your head is the international symbol for distress!" We then realised he was in distress; he had broken down and was drifting towards Goat Island. We offered a hand, but there wasn't much we could do. A water taxi eventually towed him to safety.
The track recording can be seen at the following web page:
http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php ... f85d56a676
We had a great day on the water and some nice photos for the album.
- Sea Monkey 2c.JPG (90.64 KiB) Viewed 5242 times
- Sea Monkey 1c.JPG (132.59 KiB) Viewed 5242 times
- Sea Monkey 5c.JPG (85.27 KiB) Viewed 5242 times
