It’s been a few days since a long weekend of Living on Snoloha Time. I’ve been trying to figure out how to summarize the adventure.
Something like this might work:
Beautiful Friday afternoon sail, followed by a fun dinghy cruise into town, only to run out of gas on the way back to the boat, resulting in about a one-mile row. A picture perfect Saturday sail with winds out of the SSW to Omena was next. Followed by watching the boat, while at anchor, from shore, break loose from its hold and begin drifting toward the beach. Fortunately I was able to flag down a family aboard their Chris Craft runabout and they whisked me to the “Snoloha” just in time to start the motor before running aground. So then it was time to just sail to our destination of Suttons Bay…which was going smoothly until the jib halyard snapped and the jib came falling to the foredeck. So now we were forced to try and point into the wind with just the main, which sucks. So the little 4HP Yamaha was fired up and we labored our way into the wind and against the waves for about 2 1/2 miles until we finally approached the marina. At this point, we dropped the main sail only to find it had a nice tear in it.
So there were were, 17 miles (roughly) from home with no jib and a torn main, and a 4HP outboard with fuel capacity of .75 gallons and winds the next day out of the SSW (right on the nose)…not in our favor at all.
After dinner in Suttons Bay, we were exhausted. The sun, wind and stress of the day was apparent. We decided to buy a larger gas can, fill ‘er up, and get an early morning start before those SSW winds picked up. We set off around 8:00…and 4 hours later, and a few fill-ups, that little 4HP Yamaha delivered us back to the safety and comfort of Mooring Ball #1.
It was quite the adventure. Part pure Snoloha Escapism, with a dose of holy-sh!t-what-do-we-do-now realism. There was ZERO Facebooking or Tweeting or emailing. So that was good. We definitely ‘check out’. I wish I could blame it on Corona or huge gusts of wind…but it was just equipment failure. Plane and simple. Things break.
But once it was all said and done, it was still fun. It was one helluva an adventure. Now it’s time for some repairs…so we can do it all over again – L.O.S.T.
The little engine that could
Sunset in Suttons Bay
One response
Look at the bright side. You could be living ashore doing the 9-5 thing. Stay safe out there. 🙂