The sun shining into my tent woke me up early. I went into the caravan tent to check how many sachets of Oatso Easy were left. There weren’t many, so I grabbed one and then went back to bed, having secured my breakfast before the hungry hordes woke up.
An hour or so later, I was sitting on the patio, enjoying my breakfast and a mug of tea, when Shari arrived, a trapeze harness dangling over her arm. She informed us that one of the other sailors had leant it to us.
I asked her what he had said.
She replied that he had told her it was about time we started trapezing and that we should watch out for thorns when walking along a certain path.
I briefly wondered whether she had had a temporary fit of insanity. That didn’t sound like a particularly coherent statement to me.
Anyway, we took him at his word, and headed down to the water to have some fun. And boy did we have fun!
We started off with Shari steering and me trapezing. Gradually I started to steer the boat myself while out on the wire, as well as operating the main sheet. It was lots of fun, but terribly scary as well! I was constantly worried about losing my balance, or slipping off the boat, but slowly my confidence grew. We had some nice gusts, where the hull managed to lift about 5cm’s higher than it had previously been, however most of the wind was pretty pap. It helped to have Shari hanging out on the opposite side of the boat, though.
All in all, it was pretty awesome, and I can’t wait to do it again!
Just as we were about to have lunch, an enormous storm blew up. We all ran helter skelter down to the shore to de-rig. Of course, as soon as the storm noticed what we were doing, it decided to frustrate us and blow past without shedding so much as a drop of rain! Typical!
Once all storm danger had subsided, we rigged again and headed out to enjoy the leftover storm wind. We had so much fun! All three of us were on the boat at once. We didn’t bother to trapeze, to tell you the truth, I was pretty scared to try. The waves were pretty big, for a dam, and we were constantly getting wet. There was spray flying everywhere! The bottom part of the sail was so wet it was dripping! We were all soaked through and shivering with cold and adrenaline. At one point, our leeward bow dug in all the way up to the crossbar, before recovering and speeding us on our way. Wow! Talk about adrenaline rushes!
It was the bestest sail ever.
The Regatta 