Wednesday Sailing
During the week I have been following closely the weather forecast for Wednesday. I want dry, fairly windy days. It’s nice if it is not chilly. A temperature of 20°C would be great, but let’s not ask too much from the weather. Anyway I have found this great website (skylinkweather.com used by aviators but pretty good for sailors too) which has very good and detailed weather forecast as well as history. You see, now that is still the beginning and I don’t know exactly what wind speed is ideal, I can go back to the history and check the data of a specific day in the past that I was sailing and I can make a comparison with that. If you tell me that the wind speed is going to be 5 knots I doesn’t mean a lot to me. If you tell me though that last week Wednesday it was 3 knots, I can get an idea and know what to expect, roughly.
Anyway, the forecast for today was fairly OK. Warm-ish, dry, and not very windy (wind speed: 10mph). I would like stronger winds, but it would be OK. All day today I was excited. I had arranged to meet with Kelly at the club to sail together. Whoever would arrive first had to rig the boat. Unfortunately, I was late (some accident on North Circular had caused long queues all over the place). When I arrived at WSC, Kelly was ready and waiting. I ran to change and we launched the boat. As expected the wind was not great. Still, it was a good experience. When there is hardly any wind, if you do something wrong, the boat stops. Then you need to do something to move. If it’s windy the boat moves no matter what and you get this false sense that you are doing OK.
So, not enough wind to be exciting, but good enough to learn. Most of the boats around us were going faster then us. We didn’t have the fastest boat, but I think if we were more experienced we would be going even slightly faster. Anyway, we manage to stay away from those who were racing (that’s important), we didn’t crash with anyone (important too) and we managed to stay dry! That means that for two beginners we didn’t do bad. We both took turn at the helm, Kelly first and then me and I gave the helm back to Kelly to bring the boat in. Covered the boat and went to change. I didn’t see Kelly to ask her if she enjoyed it but she said to someone that she did. For me every moment I spend sailing is good.
After I changed I sat at the bar for a while and had a chat with some other people. Apparently some of them still mention the incident with the guys from the other club that tried to recruit me by bitching about WSC. It was quite out of order. I have to find someone to sail with this coming Sunday. Kelly will be racing. I will try to do the same. Martin has offered to sail with me. I’ll email him and see what he says. Hopefully I’ll be racing too. I’ll let you know how it goes.