Several people have asked why this wasn't in our blog. Well, I forgot the camera that day. So here's a photo from a 2003 Snipe regatta at Newport Yacht Club, on Irondequoit Bay. Peggy and I served as Principal Race Officers and John Boettcher was kind enough to take this photo of Canto. Please ignore the swim towels on the lifelines. Here's a story from last fall.

Thursday, November 3, 2005 - Yesterday George and I moved his Soverel 33, Outrageous, from Rochester (New York) Yacht Club to Sodus Bay for winter storage and some work by Great Lakes Yacht Works. It's a 30-mile sail along the south shore of Lake Ontario.

The forecast was for a warm (~65 degrees), clear day, but with southwest winds of 25-35 mph, and occasionally gusting higher. Mutual respect and a certain amount of testosterone prevented either of us from doing the intelligent thing by being the first to chicken-out, so we left the mouth of the river at 9 a.m.

My Pearson Wanderer's 7 oz. 100% roller furling working jib was the smallest heavy-duty sail that either of us owned, so that was hoisted on the Soverel's Tuff-Luff. I'm guessing it is about equal to a #4 on the larger, lighter, Soverel 33.

With the main sail cover firmly in place we turned east at the end of the river and headed east toward Sodus Point. The jib filled with a SNAP and set beautifully. The port jib car was pulled forward to power-up the head of the sail; as though we needed any more horsepower! The lake's surface was not just lumpy with waves, but covered with breaking seas and spindrift as the heavy winds blew the tops right off those waves.

With no main set, George reported that the helm was light as we surfed the rhumbline across the building seas of the Irondequoit embayment. We expected that the seas would moderate as we got across the embayment and closed on the Webster shore and got into something of a lee.

We noted several large flocks of black birds with white wings bobbing about in the lake. Our friend John Boettcher later told us that they were probably White-winged Scoters, who fly down from northern Canada and often winter on Lake Ontario. They feed on Zebra Mussels, among other things, so maybe they will help keep that infestation down.

We found little shelter out on the lake by the Webster shoreline. The winds seemed to channel along the shore and became mostly west. Waves were even breaking on the south shore, so we resigned ourselves to living with what Mother Nature was serving.

The fastest we saw was 13.5 knots on the GPS. With just the working jib pulling us down the lake we entered the channel at Sodus Bay at 12:45 p.m. I know (hope?) that's the fastest that jib will ever go while attached to a boat. Needless to say, it was a fun day.