Big tide this coming Sunday.
Friends of mine are sailing the Gloucester Ring tomorrow. I'm jealous. Dad made it quite clear that, focused as we are on Calstar now, he wasn't interested in the mud or discomfort. I did, briefly, think about trying to find another boat, but the main charm of the Ring to me is sailing around it with Dad.
So I'm sitting this one out.
I've no regrets. Calstar is an adventure like nothing I've had before (though I exclude both my marriage and my kids from that observation; different category of adventure there), and perhaps the start of something that when, all those years ago I came back to sailing, seemed stupidly out of reach and "for other people". For the first time in my life I appear to have a plan. Albeit a ten year one.
So yes, I wish I was sailing the Ring again in the morning. But I know exactly why I'm not. I really wish them the joy of it. I'm jealous, but it's a good kind of jealous.
Sunday we're sailing up channel to The Shoots.
They're called The Shoots for a reason. The channel narrows, the tide flows fast, and it's a big, big tide, as previously mentioned. Not often you see a LW predicted of -0.2. Not sure we're actually going to go through the Shoots and under the bridge. But we shall see. Next to no wind is forecast. I'd suggest that would mean the waters will be calm, but I'm not so sure. I know they're going to be turbulent up river in the Noose. You can't shove 15.5m of water into a little channel like ours without a few bumps forming up in protest.
Anyway, for the most part, wind or no wind, I'm really looking forward to getting Calstar out in the open water again.
Chris, skipper of Misty Lady, on watching the "If I were a kind father" YouTube clip posted earlier, mentioned our leeward rigging looked slack. I think it was just the lowers slapping around, but worry enough anyway. I'm all over rig-tension and race-tuning an Enterprise, but Calstar is a different scale of beast altogether.
Kemp Sails have what seems to be a very interesting guide rig tuning which I found via the Westerly Owners Association website:
http://www.kempsails.com/technical-data/19-tuning-masthead-rigs/file.html
Got to admit, whilst I know it's something I've got to deal with before I head out into the next blow, I'm a little intimidated by the scale of things and the potential ramifications of getting something wrong.
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