Ever since we got the boat finished, John and I have spent large swaths of the weekend out on the lake – sailing around, and fishing, and swimming, and just generally enjoying the heck out of life.

The first weekend of August we took a long weekend off and went to to Michigan to visit John’s family.  We stayed at his brother’s place on Whitmore Lake, and were joined by another brother, his Mom and his Step-Dad.  They brought their boats (a kayak, a small single-hull sailboat, and a canoe) and we all went out on the lake.  That was actually the first time that there was enough wind for us to really sail, and it was a pleasure to find out that our boat handles very well indeed under sail.

Building that boat?  Was totally one of the best ideas ever.  (For which John gets all of the credit, as it was his idea, and then all of his hard research, and planning, and designing, and building.  I just helped sometimes.)

While the boat was being built, I asked John a lot of questions about sailing, and the mechanics of using the wind to make the boat go where you wanted it to go.  He explained about the different kinds of rigging was, what beating and tacking were, the physics of sailing into the wind… but when I would ask how you knew something, like how you knew that you needed to trim the sail, or to what degree you needed to adjust it to make the most of the wind, his answer was that you would just know, that you would be able to feel it.  Which was a little frustrating at the time, because I am the sort of person who likes to plan everything out and who wants to know how to do something before I actually set out to do it.

Turns out that he was right.  It is way easier to learn how to sail if you don’t get hung up on reading books and websites about it and just get out and do it.  And a lot of it is really intuitive, you really do just kind of feel how you should adjust the sails to catch the wind.  Which is pretty cool.

I prefer to sit up front and work the foresail, while John sits in back and handles the mainsail and rudder.  (When I am sitting up front, I don’t have to duck for the boom, because it passes right over my head.  Bonus.)

The way that the foresail works, it directs the wind into the mainsail (unless you are running gull-winged before the wind) and like the mainsail, it has to be able to swing from one side of the boat to the other.  The mainsail on our boat has a boom, which makes swinging it easy.  The foresail does not have a boom or a spar (though this is the next project, so I am told) which makes working it a little trickier.  At the bottom corner of the foresail, there is a large grommet, and to this grommet are attached two ropes.  These ropes run through eyebolts on the front crossbar over the pontoons on each side.  And you haul on the ropes to pull the foresail from one side to the other, and to adjust the angle of the sail.  Frankly, it reminds me a lot of riding horses and using the reins to direct the animal.  It is also a heck of a good upper body workout, since you are working against the wind the whole time.

Something that I learned:  wrapping the ropes around your hands will give you better control and leverage, and will also give you bruises and rope-burns.

Something that we learned about sailing the last time that we went out – throwing out fishing lines when you are putt-putting around using the trolling motor is a great idea, and you can do a pretty good job of catching fish that way.  But throwing out fishing lines when you are under sail is not a great idea.  Because sailing our boat is a two person job, and each person needs to be using both hands, especially if there is a stiff wind.  Which leaves exactly no hands free to deal with the fishing poles if you happen to get a fish.  Also, if you are paying more attention to sailing then to your fishing lines, you might not notice right away that you have a fish on your line, which is bad for the fish.  Lesson decidedly learned.  That was a very exciting five minutes or so, and a few times there I thought that there was a chance that we might go over.

Also, I have learned that you really need a lot less wind to really move (especially with a boat as small as ours) then I had originally assumed.  I thought that 5-7 mph winds were nothing, too light.  Turns out that is actually just about perfect.  Last weekend, when the winds from Hurricane Irene blew through Ohio, we went on the lake.  The wind that day was 12-13 mph, with gusts up to 17mph or so.  And that was actually a little bit much for me.  Yeah, we really flew over the water, but it was a lot harder to handle the foresail, and my hands and arms got tired pretty quickly.

Even a little bit of speed feels like a heck of a lot more on the water.

Holy shit!  It’s a boat!

It's a boat! (And just look at that gaff rig!)

John took it to get inspected so it could be registered, titled, and licensed on Friday.

On Saturday we finished up the rigging and did a dry run of assembling it in the driveway.

This morning we took it out on Ceasar Creek Lake.

In the water for the (official) first time

We saw some huge lily pads

We put-putted around the lake with the trolling motor.  (Alas, the weather did not cooperate 100% and there was not even a little bit of a breeze.)  We fished off of the boat.  (John caught 2 fish worth keeping.)  We jumped off of the boat and went swimming in the lake.

It was pretty awesome.  As John put it – “We leveled up.”

One and a half years of work all leading up to this morning… of which John admittedly did 99.9% of the work.  I helped out here and there, but mostly watched and asked if I could give him a hand.  Turns out there is not really a whole lot of two person work to be done when you are making a boat.

Anyway.  Boating = awesome.  I think that we will be spending a lot of weekend time, up until it gets to be too chilly to boat, out on the lake.

And then we came home and helped the neighbors chainsaw up a tree that split in half during the windstorm last week.

That would be the boat, and not Ivory Soap.

(That was the punchline of a lot of my Grandpa’s rambling stories/jokes when I was little.  “{story goes here, and then at a dramatic turning point}…. “it floooooaaaaats…. it flooooaaaats…..” “What floats, Grandpa?” “IVORY SOAP!”  This was hilarious when I was five.)

Anyway, the weather was beautiful this past (as in last) weekend, so John and I spent most of it outside and working on the boat.  Among other things we got  lot of work done varnishing various bits of woodwork.  It was actually so hot out, that the varnish was drying almost as quickly as I could paint it on, so I didn’t have to spend a lot of time waiting between coats.  (I also got a sunburn from that much time out in the sun, big surprise.)

We got a bit behind in the boat work lately because of all of the rain and storms.  Fiberglass takes forever to cure if it is damp out, and you just don’t want to try to varnish anything at all if it is significantly humid.  So we really took advantage of the hot, dry days.

Sunday morning we packed up the boat on the trailer, and went to a boat launch on the Little Miami River, about 10 minutes away from our house in Miamisburg, for its first launch.  (There was no champagne involved, however.  We will save that for when the boat is actually done.)  We needed to float the main hull (loaded down with all of the rest of the gear) and then the pontoons so that we could measure the waterline and the draft.  All of that so that John could do the necessary calculations to figure out the correct angle and drop needed to attach the pontoons.

We are getting closer to being done.  And we have a deadline, since we have plans to go sailing with John’s family in late July, early August.

And in just breaking news, John made a tiny little micro cannon for the boat and called me downstairs to watch him fire it.

He milled it out of a section of brass rod, and yes, it really fires.  You put a little wick in the hole near the closed end, pour in a little bit of black powder (triple-7, actually), tamp it in with a little brass rod, put in a bebe, tamp that in, and then balance it on the back step and touch a grill lighter to the wick.  POP!  We think that the bebes were at least clearing the patio, though we couldn’t tell if we were actually hitting anything other then the ground.  There is really no good way of actually aiming the micro cannon.

Now we just need a swivel mount, and a boat to mount it to.

Heh.

John comes up with the coolest things sometimes….