An action packed weekend full of sailing, sail repair and observing the grounding of another boat.

As usual in the summer months we set off sailing for the weekend. As we left our home marina you can see it was a beautiful day. Winds were quite low but its hard not to enjoy sailing on such a beautiful day.

Our large headsail (135% genoa) has a lot of UV weakening and damage near the leech, which we believe has occurred because with sail stretch the UV protection no longer covers all of the sail when it is furled. As a consequence we have several tears. A consequence is this sail, which is great for low wind conditions, is rolled up and out of use. Thus, in this low wind condition we brought out our high wind 90% jib. With less surface area it does not power the boat well. Our choices – i) stay home or ii) sail slowly. Of course we sailed. We made our way over to the Marblehead area and decided to stay at Beverly port marina. As is the norm on a weekend in the summer there were several races taking place.

Once in Beverly we went to the Anchor pub. Its full of locals and you can have several beers, and dinner for two for $40. The locals are quite an interesting bunch and we struck up a conversation with a veteran, John, who served in Vietnam.

Next morning we woke to low wind; actually, no wind. With a little coaxing Yolande decided it was time to repair the 135% genoa. We put on 20 feet of 10 inch wide adhesive backed Dacron (a sail fabric) then got out our new Sailrite sewing machine. Yolande sewed up a storm and we quickly changes sails and set to sea.

Boat traffic in the islands around Beverly

As we were leaving the Marblehead/Salem/Beverly island area we saw another race. In this one there were larger boats than on the Saturday and they were sailing over to just west of Nahant and back.

It was great to have the 135% genoa back on board since winds ranged from 5-12kts and we were able to make good pace.

As we arrived back in Boston harbor we saw a boat “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” that had run aground next to the channel “Lower Middle”. This can be a tricky channel but if you use the buoys and sail between them there are no problems. However, today the problem was even worse. On Sunday the moon was a super moon so at 5:22pm the low tide was about a foot lower than usual. I have never seen the tide so low. In fact lower middle rock was exposed and you can see surf breaking over the rock. This boat was unlikely to be using its charts. Probably they have sailed over this area before without knowing the near miss that they had had. They are not alone, however, as we have seen a commercial vessel run aground here this year also.

Here is Tow Boat US rushing off to help. However, the tide is so low it cant get closer than about 100ft.

We saw this incident about an hour before low tide. I imagine they had to sit on the rock for some time, 2-3hrs at least

Back to some good news. Here is the sail in all of her beauty with her sail patches (I think Yolande should show off her sewing machine on the docks and she would get good patching business). When we got home we then made first use of our new jib sock which we purchased from Becky at LeeSailCovers. I affectionately call it our sail condom. It was easy to measure for, to install and now she covers the 135% genoa to prevent further UV damage of our sail.