Spring Sailing- Local Sailing News

Today was sunny, temps in the mid 60s, and blowing NNE 20-25knots.  Seasonal sailors dust off the cobwebs and throw off the bowlines and begin to play in the southern Bay. Unfortunately this time of year accidents on the water tend to be fairly common.  Today brought the news of a local sailing vessel experiencing problems at Little Creek inlet.  The inlet has rock jetties but the approach is pretty straight forward.  In today's case it is assumed the vessel lost power and the wind pushed the vessel into shallow water and the rocks.  Luckily the three people on board were uninjured and rescued.

Our approach when entering an inlet is to always have at least one sail up.  If engine trouble develop we can still maneuver the boat and hopefully sail her out of harms way.  We practice this often by usually sailing the boat all the way to the marina slip.  This practice has come in handy on more than one occasion.  One event I can recall we were entering Little Creek Inlet on a breezy summer day.  Ray went to start the engine and it did not turn over.  We already had full sails up so without panicking we continued our approach as we have done numerous time before under sail.  We made a turn to port toward the marina and then dropped our head sail. This allowed our boat speed to be reduced, and with the main still up we were able to keep Janus moving and maintain steering control. We then made another turn to port and began heading into the marina.  Now in tight quarters we dropped the main sail and using our tiller moving it back and forth we were able to scull Janus safely into her slip.

Here I am with Janus on a typical spring day. Hope you enjoy the short video.

Happy Sailing  from Nikki and Ray