Rattler Sailing

Motutapu was awesome and I've got lots of editing to do, but first: I went for my second solo harbour mission tonight.

Here's a story of some very silly progress towards the 10,000 hours 🙃

A 10-15kt easterly has come in and it will be seriously blowing from tomorrow until the weekend, and I wanted to go for a burn. The harbour right by my house looked great, and I decided to try launching from the dinghy dock at St Mary's Bay.

My plan was to tack to the Westhaven exit then reach across the harbour and back (purple line in the first map pic) so I didn't battle too much upwind on my return.

Anyway... The green area in that pic covers as far as I got 😂 I launched all right (green circle). The breeze (white arrow) was between 0 and 8kts, with big gusts and shifts, plus the tides are massive right now so I couldn't have my daggerboard down in either of the blue areas.

There were two 18-person dragonboats and their chase RIB following the orange path and avoiding the paddlers added a few tacks. The wind was higher in the harbour (solidly 12 gusting 16) but getting steadier. I started being able to use the harness.

Then I fell in, by the superyachts. Which was refreshing, because I was pretty warm in my wetsuit. I got up and got going and made good headway until I fell in again around the docks south of the car ferry (yellow circle). Then, I heard three sharp blasts from them. I think they were waiting for me to exit before they departed, until they realized I might take a while 😂 I let them leave and get a good head start before I continued my battle, but I was aware that I was pretty fatigued and hadn't actually gotten into the challenging stuff yet.

I was around the green X when I fell in again, and I knew I was beat, so I turned around and boosted downwind back to the dock 😂

Had a good chuckle about how successfully I had failed and went to Swashbucklers for a beer and hot chips 🍻🍟 where I ran into some legends fresh off the Round North Island race: Andrew and Nick from Akonga. Nice to catch up with you both and hear some solid salty sea stories from your adventures! 🥳

Joined the crew on Bizzarre for my first Wednesday night race in a few months last night. Was a bit rusty on the bow and it has certainly been a minute since I was last on a big boat, but man, I think we did okay 😁

Lovely warm seabreezes and a reachy course home saw us hoisting the masthead spinnaker 🍌 peeling to the A5, and a final peel to the A2 🍌 was a fun tight finish, with owner Barry saying we wrangled some of the best sail changes he'd seen on the boat (loved that!)

Thanks for having me along, team! Look forward to doing it again 🥳

✅ first solo open water session.

Done. And. Dusted. 👏
Sailed from Hamilton Rd Beach to Chelsea Buoy in Auckland Harbour. Beautiful conditions, with the perfect amount of seastate for me to practice on.

I knew I'd done it properly when I got back to shore and an older couple from one of the houses overlooking the beach came out to tell me they'd been watching me and it was "impressive." They were both past retirement age and the woman said she'd been windsurfing this morning but not gone nearly as far as I had. I was like, ummmm, YOU are the impressive one! What a goal to hope that I am still doing this in 40 years 🙏

Had one of the best dolphin experiences of my sailing life today during the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron (RNZYS) women's day out today.

Also probably a couple of my top 10 "overheard VHF radio conversations" when men (boats were allowed to have 50% or fewer male crew) radioed the committee to either argue that they were not over the line early (they were, actually, and everyone saw, because we were also on the start line when the race committee radioed a recall for them), or (curiously) to confirm that they had finished first (they had, but also, um, did you need to broadcast that?)...


**kup