Well, I’m made it to Fort Myers very early yesterday morning.  All up the trip across was about 440 miles, which took me three and a half days, a very slow pace.  I was becalmed on a daily basis and rarely saw wind over 10 knots.  I had to do a lot of sail changes and maneuvers to make it to Fort Myers without an engine.  

 I was hoping to make this qualifier a vacation and sleep a lot, but there is no way to do that when the wind is light and shifty because you simply won’t go anywhere and I have, like, these deadline things.  This means I will have to do my qualifier in France because I didn’t make the 1000 miles, which is just another set back.  Just add it to the list

It all started with the 70 mile trip to Ship Island off the coast of Gulfport, MS.  The trip out there was easy enough and I made a very nice discovery about the turboed Myrna that I had not anticipated.  On the beam reach north of Cat Island which is just west of ship, the breeze picked up to 15 plus knots and Myrna started planing flat out with just a jib and mainsail.  Flat and fast with all the water ballast and gear stacked.  She would never do that before and it’s exactly the reason I had Dave Bolyard build my flat screecher sail at the Ullman loft in Mandeville before the Bermuda 1-2.  Clark and I call it “the thing” because it’s the thing that the IMOCA open 60’s do so well with the apparent wind well forward of the beam, and we could only get Myrna to do it a 100 degrees true in 12-15 knots.  Now with the new larger sail plan and the carbon mast she does “the thing” with main/jib at about 80-90 degrees TWA, which is really exciting.  It’s not like the boat goes 15 knots at that angle, but she will now average above 8 knots which is two knots above hull speed and feels great.  

Here we are leaving Lake Pontchartrain.

Also upon rounding Cat Island to sail upwind to round Ship Island the wind increased and I had to reef the mainsail, and discovered that her heavy air upwind speed has gone up a lot.  She feels like a rocket upwind in over 15 knots now and seems to just launch forward when before she would just punch through.  I used to look at the gps speeds fluctuater rapicly (because Garmin dampening is pretty bad) from around 5.7 – 6.2 knots upwind in breeze.  Now, with the same gps the speed fluctuates from 6 – 6.5 knots (sometimes up to 6.8 which I know is BS).  These are not good representations of real upwind speeds, but it does tell me that the average has gone up significantly and you can feel it easily from the helm.  What’s great about this is that I was only trying to improve her speed in light air when I made these modifications.  I’ll take it.

Here I am taking my mandatory picture in front of landmark for Classe Mini.  It was very wet and at this point and you can hardly see the fort on Ship Island in the background.  

Here’s the not so good part.  Once I was outside of the Mississippi Sound and beating int some really short steep waves that were being compressed and stacked in between Cat and Ship Island, I noticed the mainsail luff peeling out at the mast.  This was with the first reef in and the peeling stopped at the top two battens where the battens were under a lot of compression.  Conversly the head of the sail is bein leveraged away from the mast by those battens as one applies leech tension.  So I spoke to Sam Vasques at Gulfport Yacht Club and sailed to the club under jib only to meet him.  He helped me put the boat away and gave me a couch to sleep on.  Then I borrowed my friend Jeremy Richmond’s Dad’s truck the next morning (it takes a village) and brought the sail to Dave Bolyard’s loft to switch out the bolt rope to a larger one.  Dave mentioned to me that he thought the bolt rope was too small, but I liked the way the sail went up and down and wanted to see what would happen.  Well now I know what he knew!  We play mental tug of war often and I’m getting used to him winning.  

So I get to the loft, drop the sail off, drive to NOLA to pick up some spectra luff tape from the North loft there then drive back to Mandeville and Mark (Oz) Oswald and I set about doing some surgery.  He and Julie Bolyard did the bolt rope which I made little bits or something small and tedious, and we cut the boltrope down at the head and attached two plastic slugs which we knew wouldn’t pull out since that is where the biggest aft loading is happening.  

The next day I left again and the big breeze had shut down.  I missed a really good window for sure.  I would like to annouce this now.  The Gulf of Mexico has officially shut down for the sweltering summer which approaches.  She takes a vacation like this every year and lies around getting fat and lazy, only to punctuate her behavior with a hurricaine or three.  It can be pretty aweful, but like a family member, we love her anyway.  Either way, I was off sailing in the Gulf of Mexico again.  The place where it all started for me so many years ago. 

I’ll continue with the rest of this tomorrow.

Here’s a picture Sam Vasques took while towing me out.  Part of the tow agreement was that I had to participate in their boat parade which was litterally the least I could do considering that Same came and got me at 11 pm two nights before.

 

I stole this from Facebook.  He called the picture “BET and 32 0z.”   The back story there is that he picked me up and we grabbed some beers on the way to his house.  Sam and I sat around for a while watching cable.  At some point it occured to us how funny it is that a bunch of people thought I was bravely sailing alone into the Gulf of Mexico while I was actually laying on Sam’s couch, showered, drinking a big beer and watching a really dumb movie on Black Entertainment Television.  These things happen.

-R