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Shelly
& Her Crew
I had a great time sailing. I've read a lot about sailing and understood the concepts, but getting some actual experience was fantastic. |
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I learned that you can easily enough get 'stuck' pointing into the wind and not be able to get moving out of the situation for some time. Maybe there's a trick but we didn't know it if there is. We just waited for the boat to get turned enough to catch some wind. |
I also learned that things can happen really quickly. Bad things.
I was manning the tiller and the main sheet (we had shared these duties up till then) and we were getting some good wind and the boat really started to heel. I tried to turn to lessen the heeling - I didn't want to get dumped and loose my glasses. The problem was that I turned the tiller the wrong way and heeled over even further. At that point I figured it was better to hang onto my glasses and go into the water for sure, than to take a chance on staying on the boat and not hold onto my glasses and then get thrown in.
So I took the dive. Shelly took over the helm and I climbed back aboard.
Once I was back onboard, Shelly decided she wanted to get wet too (I think you need to have this natural inclination to be a Sunfish sailer) and she went over the side.
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Somewhere in the course of events I managed to bruise my thigh. I'm not sure if it was when I went over the side, or when I slid off the boat when we came ashore. I actually think the latter is the case. In the photo above, you can see a little black fixture just in front of my right hand. As I slid off the boat, I know that I hit my thigh on that and it hurt. So I think that's actually what happened.
To the right is a photo of the bruise. It was pretty sore and swollen the first couple of days.
Hopefully I'll avoid this on my S2.
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