Merry Christmas!

My family came down from Michigan to celebrate a slightly warmer Christmas. The weather isn’t fully cooperating, but it’s still warmer than Michigan.

Saturday looked like the best weather for sailing – sunny and mid-70s sounded perfect. The closer we got to Saturday, however, the worse the forecast got. By the time we got there, the forecast was down to mid-60s and cloudy. But it was still the day with the most wind so we piled everyone aboard and cast off the dock lines.

Almost immediately there were some dolphin sightings. Then, the most amazing thing happened: we had 3 or 4 dolphins swimming right under the trampoline, trying to catch a bow wave. The entire family piled onto the trampolines for an up close look at our playful neighbors, who were barely out of arm’s reach.

It seemed like no one else got photos of the event, but having seen it before, I dropped inside to get my cell phone and snap a few shots. They stayed with us for quite a while, maybe 10 minutes or so, and it was definitely the highlight of the sail.

We had a few boats tacking ahead of us towards the harbor, but we were aiming for a more low-effort sail so we motored out into a nice beam reach and raised the sails. This is only the second time we’ve sailed Hobbes so it took a few minutes to remember all the steps. We sailed out into the harbor until we reached a wall of fog. The air started to feel incredibly dense and cold. Rather than try to sail through the mist, we turned around and headed back towards the marina. The wind was unpredictable and gusty, but it was still a pretty good sail.

As we approached the marina, Kyle and I discussed our plan for docking. We had planned to return on an outgoing current so we could nose right into our slip and tie up. However, as we got close to the dock I couldn’t slow us down. We were going against the current, but the wind was going with us and keeping our speed up. I bailed out and handed the helm over to Kyle. Our neighbors, Chris and Shawna, saw us coming in and positioned themselves on the dock to help with line handling.

On the second attempt, Kyle struggled to maintain our direction. With the opposing wind and current we couldn’t maintain a straight line. As we got very close to the dock it looked like the starboard bow was going to collide with the dock so Kyle put both engines in full reverse but there was a still a sickening crunch as we made contact with the dock.

After that, it was a group struggle to rein Hobbes in and get docked. I think it was almost more brute effort than actual engine work.

I felt pretty sick about the whole thing, Chris said the impact had inverted the bow a little bit but it popped right back out again. There’s a big scrape mark, though we didn’t crack the fiberglass. We’ll have to reinforce the bow with some epoxy and fiberglass, I think. That event put a real damper on the whole sail, although I think my family was still in good spirits after that, I could hardly eat lunch. Docking is the thing that keeps me up at night, and now that we’ve lived through a shitty docking scenario hopefully it will be easier next time. Chris mentioned that we probably don’t have enough horsepower to control the boat in that kind of wind, which sounds reasonable and implies that there would have been no good docking scenario that day. Several people have told us that Charleston docking is a nightmare due to the strong currents.

Kyle and I dissected the event to figure out what we can do better next time.

1. Make a plan, but don’t be afraid to revise. We planned for docking against the current, but we should have recognized that the wind was stronger than the current and we needed to back off and make a new plan.
2. Always remember that the wind and current outside the marina can easily change once you’re inside the marina. Once we got into the protected zone the current was much weaker.
3. Make a list of rules for the crew. With eight people on board, we learned a few lessons about making sure people knew when to help and when to stay out of the way.

On the day we bought the boat, I wrote that you learn a lot of lessons in the first year. We are definitely learning ours.