Century Club: Jeffrey Halpern

Friday afternoon I checked the weather for the weekend. Saturday looked like a good sailing day, sunny, a balmy 45 degrees and 5-10 knots of wind gusting to 15. A perfect winter sailing day.

I was totally bummed out because I was committed to representing the Chesapeake Shorthanded Sailing Society (CHESSS) on Saturday at the Chesapeake Bay Yacht Racing Association (CBYRA) coordination meeting.

Then late in the day Friday, I got an email saying that the Coordination Meeting had been canceled. Wooooo Hoooo!

Saturday morning, whiel doing the slow breakfast and hanging with my long suffering wife, we started talking about what we each would do that day, so I checked the weather. Thomas Point was showing 37 degrees with 15 knot winds gusting into the low 20’s. The usual suspect weather sources showed a high around 41, partially cloudy, and plenty of wind. 

So I began going through the mental exercise of how many layers, and whether I expected to reef. In warmer weather I would not reef in that wind range, but with cold dense air, I might need to.

Then it sunk in....40 degrees and 20 knot gusts. I thought, "What the heck is wrong with me? Who in their proper mind would think that was an acceptable sailing weather. "

I decided that maybe I would bail out of going sailing. After all, I figured that Sunday I am scheduled to go frostbite racing. That should provide my sailing fix! So I checked Sunday's weather. 44 degrees and gusts to 2 knots. Nuts! Probably no race....

With that I started donning 4 layers on top, 3 layers on the bottom, warm socks and liners, making sure I had my winter sailing gloves, and liners and a wool watch cap in my bag, and trudged down to the dock to rig the boat. By then the wind had laid down a little, probably 10-12 knots with gusts to 15. Air temperatures were up around a scorching 40, and not a cloud in the sky...Not too bad for a winter sail.

As soon as I got under sail, I knew that going out was the right call. I was dressed comfortably for the conditions and it was a glorious sailing day.

I must admit to a bad case of John Masefield syndrome or in street jargon, I was seriously Jones'n for a sail. And although the winds were very light wind, it was great just to be out there.

It didn't matter to me that Synergy was barely moving. It was good enough that she was moving fast enough to 'boil water', maintain steerage, and slither wakelessly past small fragments of foliage drifting by on the surface of the water.

For most of us, and certainly for me, the joys of sailing is in large part sensory. Sometimes it's a tactile sense of forces of wind and water, or the warmth of sunlight on your skin. Sometimes it's visual enjoyment of the passing beautiful scenery. Today it was auditory. Today's sail was about as silent as it gets out there, a profound silence punctuated by distant sound effects.
A distant fog horn.
The honks and wing slaps of a distant flock of geese taking flight and a raucus debate about who will navigate the next leg of their passage.
Or a hundred wing whistles of salt ducks in flight a half mile away,
A random Jake brake from a tractor trailer truck on the Bay Bridge 5 miles away. Or
The rhythmic "piiitchtoo....piiitchtoooo....piiitchtoooo" of someone trying to pull start a recalcitrant outboard.

So, while I may have only sailed perhaps a half mile (at most) round trip, It was good for my soul.

On the other hand, I saw a lot of evuidence that the winter storms were tough on some of the boats along the creek. Coming up the creek I saw torn winter covers, a tattered bimini, and the frayed edges of furled sails were in full evidence. And then there was this poor specimen in the photo. I was deeply saddened to see this tragedy since the owner put a huge amount of work into this old girl, replacing all of her standing and running rigging

The last race in any series is always bitter sweet. It is always sad to part tacks with the folks you have crewed with. Like any good team, these are your friends and comrades. Together, you have been through a weekly struggle for a common objective. And after spending time together every week for months, after that race, you may not see each other again until the racing starts a new season. Yet there is an odd relief to not having one day, or one night, of your week inked in for months at a time.

But if there had to be a final race of the frostbite season, this one was definitely going out with a bang. According to Weather Station 44063 in Annapolis Harbor, the winds were blowing around 20 knots with gusts to 25 knots, including one 6 minute interval with gusts approaching 30 knots. That may have been easier sailing than the reality on the water. According to our wind instruments, the ambient wind was in the mid-teens, but would suddenly jump up to around 20 knots and chaneg direction sometimes dramatically, That meant a day of being underpowered in the lulls and being knocked down and over powered in the gusts. Those conditions are a mainsail trimmer's worst dream. The helmsman is almost along for the ride at time, For the rest of the crew, those conditions are about as physically demanding as it gets racing here on the Bay. But we had a good time, came home with the full crew intact, and didn’t break anything on the boat.

Once I got home I continued building the mounting bracket for the autopilot. I cut out and trial assembled it before prepping it to fillet and glass the parts together. Seeing it in real life decided that it is a little too heavy and so I am revising the design, and will probably use foam coring for the bracket sides rather than plywood coring in the picture.

But after two days of heavy air sailing, waking up on Monday morning, my body greeted me with the clear message that the age on my driver's license is accurate, no matter how hard I try to ignore it.

It wasn’t a bad day to be on the water. We got to the boat and out on the water early. Heading out of the slip, there seemed to be a decent breeze that was well above the fickle winds than had been predicted.

Out in the River, we practiced some tacks and experimented with sail trim, and VMG downwind.

But by the time the race committee had gotten on station and the starting sequence was set to go, the wind had dropped to nothing and perhaps a little less.

So we motored back to the slip, put the boat to bed, and wandered into to the club to have lunch and get our sailing fix by talking about sailing.