A Short but Stressful Trip
25 January 2016 | Burnt Store Marina, FL
Jill
The hardest part about sailing, unless you hit a storm or some other hazard, is leaving and arriving, especially docks, and most especially fixed docks with pilings. Yesterday we moved from the Platinum Point Yacht Club dock to slip I-5 at Burnt Store Marina. Same basin. Along the way we stopped at the fuel dock to pump out our holding tanks. There's a three-day limit at the club dock, but we're having some cold weather and then more storms so wanted to hang out for another week, waiting for an anticipated change in the weather patterns.
The log showed 0.27 nm traveled. We had to cast off from the dock we were on which included slipping the lines from 4 pilings while Bud tried to keep the boat centered in the slip. It's some kind of law of boating that when you're trying to push the boat away from a piling you feel all 35,000 lbs. of it. But when you're just trying to pull a dock line from around the piling you will effortlessly pull the boat into the piling.
The pump-out dock was fine, but when we went to leave the slight wind managed to hold the boat against the dock so Bud had to go out in reverse and let the prop walk pull the boat over, as the attendant and I couldn't get the boat to push out at all.
That same wind should have moved the boat over into our new dock. Bob and Myrna had left the gas dock and were waiting to assist us at our new dock. The theory was to go in close to the outside upwind piling so I could slip a loop over it. That went well. Bob was waiting to catch the bow when the wind moved us to the dock. But it didn't. Through another perversion of boating, the wind now seemed to be holding us against the windward pilings, away from the dock. It was a huge slip. It took a lot of maneuvering to get us in. Thank goodness Bob and Myrna were there or it could have gotten really ugly.
I found this whole episode very discouraging and told Bud, not for the first time, that he ought to get a more able person to crew with him. I'm not sure what I would do until they came back, but I'm pretty sure Bud would able to do more sailing like he likes (offshore) if he had someone else to do it with. He told me he didn't want any other crew and he appreciated the effort I made to do what we do manage to do. So what can I say? I'll keep trying.