The morning Access-Ability event was cancelled at the last minute due to high winds. Bhavani and I had planned to sail afterwards in the afternoon, as she had a desire to get more experience in high winds, but moved our plans up to 11:30 due to the cancelled event. I recruited Kelly to join us. I had mostly rigged up the boat by the time both of them arrived close to 12, and we departed shortly thereafter.
I had seen earlier that there was a "chance of thunderstorms" in the forecast in the afternoon, but had assumed that was most likely in the late afternoon. Once we reached Fell's Point, I decided to check the weather again before we got too far from the docks. I saw that NWS had issued a "Special Weather Statement", and opened it to find that a line of thunderstorms bringing "potentially damaging hail" was west of Baltimore heading east at 40 knots. We turned around and made our way back toward the DSC docks, but to our dismay, the sugar barge at the Domino Sugar refinery went underway just as we approached, forcing us to navigate around it, costing valuable time. We could see the storm approaching, and tacked toward the docks as fast as we could, but heavy rains started as we got within about 100 yards of the docks. We lowered our jib for docking, but then got hit with strong gusts up to 30 knots, which, in addition to tossing us around quite a bit, caused the jib to start riding back up the forestay. Bhavani got up to try to tie it down, but just as she did so, we started getting pelted with hailstones, so I told her not to worry about the jib. We fought our way back to DSC docks, and some people who were there for a cruising mentoring session helped us secure the boat, and we all took cover under the BMI pavilion just as the storm was beginning to subside.
We changed our soaked shirts and waited until the storm had fully passed by, then headed out again. The wind had become considerably stronger than it had been before the storm. At one point, we lost control of the jib, which wrapped around the forestay. I attempted to untangle it, but was unable to, so we lowered it and tied it to the forestay. We practiced sailing around Canton for a bit, then headed back to DSC.