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Monday, August 08, 2005
The Lake Charles Messabout has come and gone again. As usual, the Lake Charlie guys were hospitable and generous to a fault. My only complaint was that there were twelve-year-old girls playing beach volleyball, and there should have been twenty-year-olds. Ken Abrahams assured me there was nothing that could be done about it. Ken owns more boats than anybody I know. Most of his boats are home built, and he brings them all on messabout day. I finally decided to sail one of those puddle ducks. His is built entirely of lumber yard materials, including a polytarp sail. Some of the other puddle ducks had Sunfish sails, and they may get better performance, but you can't beat the price of the tarp! I was surprised at how well the thing sails. I've got to build one!
I brought my kayak and Ken gave it a try. It must have felt very un-natural to him, sitting on a plastic boat! I would be wrapping up this post right about now, except for one minor detail... the Louisiana Chapter decided to go for a sail. The Louisiana Chapter doesn't really exist anymore, so I guess it was a reunion of sorts. You remember Mark Sibille, and his V17? He was there with family and friends. His friend Mike brought along an O'day mariner, and Mark had the Venture. They decided we should all go for a sail.
Mike had beached his boat, and learned that it's easier to beach it than to un-beach it. He knew that I can't wade, so he jumped out and tried to push by himself. I could see that this wasn't working, and I felt like a real wimp, sitting on the boat with the wives while he was doing all the work. He pushed the bow around, trying to twist the boat off the sand. This accomplished one thing. It backwinded the main, sending the boom around hard, smacking Mike's wife, Hope, hard on the side of the head. You have to understand, Hope has a lot of anxiety about being on boats to begin with. Mike tries to make it easy for her, and does what he can to assure her that it's not dangerous, but she still gets sweaty palms when the boat heels. So here she is, holding ice on her concussion, and still willing to go out on the water. I give Hope a lot of credit. This is hard for her. We go out because it's fun. She's going on the water in the face of abject fear. She's a real trooper. The boom started to look like it wanted to return to its previous tack, and I started to realize that it's safer in the water, so I jumped my crippled ass overboard. I needed to do SOMETHING to help, and just having my weight off the boat seemed to make a difference. Don't worry. I didn't soak my borrowed prosthetics. As I climbed off the boat, I rested my left leg on the kayak, and put my real foot in the sand, and started to push. As we got the boat farther out, the kayak got higher and higher, and I started to feel like I was at ballet practice. How do those dancers put their leg on that bar? Back in the boat, we were on our way. Janice and I had packed frozen bottles of drinking water, and Hope was thoughtfully thawing one for us, using the sizable bump on her head. The ice pack was as much a relief to her, as drinking the water was to us. It was a pretty calm day. A great day for paddling We sailed about leisurely, drinking a couple of beers, and spreading sunblock. Mike, as it turns out, has the hairiest chest I've ever seen on an animal with opposable thumbs. He hardly needed sunblock. He had taken off a really cool tee shirt that Mark had bought him in Germany. It was a sailing shirt that said “All we are sailing”. You have to love translators! He and Mark had really latched on to that phrase, and it has become their mantra. Well, I'd be wrapping up this post about now, but for what happened next. As I said, it was a calm day, and we had just enough breeze to move the boat, and keep us from baking in the August heat. At one point, I looked ahead a few hundred yards, and saw Mark's boat was starting to heel over pretty hard. Then a saw the entire bottom of the boat! No kidding. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that his mast had touched the water. I pointed out this strange event to the rest of the group, and they looked over (with better vision than mine), and said “there's someone in the water”. We were in light airs, and whatever wind had hit Paedphor, never made it to us. We sailed in the direction of the MOB, as Mark sailed in the opposite direction. Apparently, Mark's MOB technique is to sail to shore and call for help on the nearest pay phone. With too little wind, Mike cranked his old outboard. This motor puts the “rude” in Evinrude. It doesn't idle, and it has no neutral or reverse gears. We were on a collision course with the MOB, who, as it turned out, was Kim, Mark's wife. Now we knew why Mark was fleeing the scene, but I've seen enough episodes of Forensic Files to know you just can't get away with that kind of thing anymore. When we got to Kim, she was a floating reef of PFDs and throwables. Mark had tossed her anything that would float, and she, of course, felt obligated to swim to each one of them, and collect the entire set. We unburdened her of the extraneous flotation (which was waterlogged, BTW. Replace those old throwables). I took her glasses off her face, as it was a wonder she hadn't lost them already. This is where it got scary. Kim couldn't get on the boat. The Mariner has low freeboard, but Kim didn't have the upper body strength to climb aboard, and we couldn't lift her out of the water. It was futile. We joked about it, but we were all thinking the same thing. This had the potential to be a life-threatening emergency. Thankfully we were in a small body of water, and not far from shore. Kim took hold of the kayak, which we were towing, and Mike cranked up his 'rude. We scanned the lake front cottages for a pier with a ladder, and towed Kim to the nearest one. She was able to climb up to the pier, then step onto the boat. Kim was in good spirits. She told us that the boat started to heel, and she was on the leeward side. They had friends with them on their small boat, so there was no room in the crowded cockpit to jump to the safety of the windward side. I'm not sure if it would have helped, though because the boat heeled really hard. Mark later told us that his cockpit filled with water, and the boat actually passed over Kim. She emerged on the opposite side, and got to inspect the underside of the V17. Believe it or not, we enjoyed the sail back, and Kim recited a shopping list for the week, which included good new throwables and a real swim ladder. Mike actually had a swim ladder, but it was a rope ladder, and Kim couldn't get a good footing on it. She's now demanding a proper stainless ladder. I advise getting a permanently mounted one. If your ladder is in the cabin, and you go overboard, it does you no good. This would be where I'd wrap up this post, but then came dinner... and the auction. LCYC has taken possession of some dilapidated boats, in lieu of unpaid dues. These boats are a mess. No kidding. My club would have cut the lines and set them adrift long ago. Don't you hate to see boats left neglected for years? We inspected them all, and decided none of us would give a plug nickel for any of them... but Mark, who failed at deserting his wife at sea, was hatching a new plan. He carefully bided his time, counting my drinks, before deciding on the best time to propose a partnership. He knew of my plans to buy an inland cruiser for touring the bayous. I had thought of buying a power boat and adding a plywood cabin to it. But Mark had a better plan. How about we buy an old sailboat together. Bid a low ball price, and hope for the best (or maybe worst, depending on your point of view). “Let's bit $50 on that old V23” he said. “I'll take everything that's sailing related, and you get the rest”. This means he'd get the spars and other hardware, and I'd get a hull for river trips. Despite the condition of the boat, the spars were appealing to him. I know his boom is an aluminum pipe, so for $25 he can't go wrong... especially since HE won't be burdened with a crappy hull!!!!! I went along with the scheme, but then he bid $51!!! Hey, wait a minute! “No problem.” he said. “I'll pay the extra dollar.” It wasn't the money that was the issue. I didn't want him doing anything to increase our chances of winning! A dollar could tip the scales! Yikes! Well, they decided that they wouldn't announce the “winners” right away. Since they were accepting bids by mail, and they hadn't checked their mail that day, they wanted to be fair and announce the lucky new boat owners on Tuesday. So now I spend the next two days in high anxiety mode. Well, that's the end of my post... except to say that I've been thinking about that V23, and it occurs to me that it just might make a decent little cruiser. Power wash it, clorox it, and paint it, and you could spend a pleasant weekend on the lake in a $25 boat. It has a roomy cabin, and decent storage space. Maybe we should have bid $100. (P.S. That really is the end of this post... except to say this. I returned home from Lake Charlie to find an email from Cajun John. He wanted to know why I replaced the hot babe on my website with a disgusting picture of a man's ass. I went to DontForward, and got a face full of Goatse! Yikes! I've been hacked!!!!!). Archives11/01/2001 - 12/01/2001 12/01/2001 - 01/01/2002 01/01/2002 - 02/01/2002 02/01/2002 - 03/01/2002 03/01/2002 - 04/01/2002 09/01/2002 - 10/01/2002 05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004 06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004 07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004 08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004 09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004 10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004 12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005 03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005 08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005 10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005 12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006 10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007 01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008 |
. at times, we were almost totally still on the water, and on occasion, we'd heel a little. Hope tensed instantly. We assured her that there was no way a boat could get knocked down on a calm summer day such as this (Don't you love it when foreshadowing happens in real life?). 