Last Year:

For two years in a row now, my first sail of the year has been nothing but bad luck. Last year, it was not a great day to go sailing but Genoa and I decided to go anyways. It was very wet, but it was also very windy. We sailed for about two hours, got really cold, and decided to head in. We docked the boat and I went to get the trailer. I backed the trailer down with no issues, and started to crank the boat up onto it. As the boat was getting situated on the trailer, I tightened the winch and heard a crunch. I looked down and the square steel beam that holds the front of the trailer to the car snapped in two places, and was just barely hanging on. I was able to get the boat off the trailer and tied up to the dock before I drove the trailer back to the parking lot. From there I called the park ranger to try and figure out what to do next. The ranger was very helpful. He told me to tie the boat up and anchor it over by the Rowing Club’s dock, where it would be pretty isolated from the wind and quite visible. He also told me it would be OK if I used the gas engine until my trailer got fixed, as it would speed things up quite a bit. It also made things much easier since after being on the lake for almost 2 weeks, my batteries for the electric motor would have died. The second picture shows where the boat finally ended up. The next morning I went to go check on it, and to my surprise two rangers were also there making sure it was still there and secured properly. I had to climb aboard and pull in the bow line a bit as the lake’s water level was going up at about half a foot per day. By the time I fixed the trailer and removed the boat from the water, the lake was nearly full, and the base of the tree I tied to was under water.

The next day the weather was a bit better, and after checking in on it in the morning on the way to work, I came back in the afternoon to figure out what to do with the trailer. I tore off what remained of the rusty bits of trailer and there was just enough of a little lip to put the end over the trailer hitch. I got some chain at the hardware store and secured it to the car as best as I could, knowing that the chain was the only thing really holding the trailer to the car. My dad and I drove it this way to our boat guy, who chopped off the front of the trailer and replaced the whole thing. He also added the support T bars in certain places that hold the boat up. It took a few days to get the trailer back, and when we did, it was time to remove the boat from the lake. The trailer still needed a bunch of work, but it was now safe to use it to tow the boat.

This Year:

Unlike last year, this year I have been working frantically trying to get the boat in top notch for sailing at Huntington Lake this summer. Matt and I have been working on a few projects to improve the boat’s appearance and function as a camper. We were in the process of running errands for the boat when I decided we should go check out the lake, just to make sure it was still closed. To our luck, they had just fixed the dock and it was open. We scrambled back to the house no longer wanting to work on the boat, but instead it was time to go sailing. We had to take down the mast and prepare it for the trip, as it was completely gutted for cleaning and maintenance. I called Jess to see if she wanted to come too, and she had just gotten off work and wanted to hang out, so she came too. We got to the lake and had no issues getting the boat in the water. The dock was in a funny position due to a few factors but it worked nonetheless. Our sail was not that great, there was not very much wind, but the basic idea of the sail for the day was to make sure that the few leaky spots had been fixed. The step didn’t leak anymore and that’s what I really cared about. After about an hour and a half of not really sailing, we headed back in. I went to get the trailer, and we hitched up the boat. I pulled the boat out of the water, and headed up to the parking lot to derig the boat. I noticed some wires moving in front of me and stopped instantly. When I got out of the car, some overhead wires had already taken down the mast. There was luckily nobody parked in the parking lot and nobody got hurt. I had hit some excess telephone cables that were strung across the parking lot instead of coiled up or cut off at the pole. I believe these wires have been here for quite some time, but maybe I’ve always gone under them at a different place. Nonetheless, the mast was down and now I’ve got a much bigger boat project in front of me.