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| The wind was a bit light during the prestart... |
Full Moon crew
Randy “Cornbread” Olsen, Michael “Chili” Medina, Rolf “Ice Boat” Van Houten,
and John “Kraken” Mengedoht jumped ship again for the Rum Run, sailing aboard the
Shilshole-based Ranger 26 Moon Dog
rather than take Full Moon through
the locks. Moon Dog has trashed
sails, apart from the rarely used spinnaker, and a less than slippery bottom so
we knew we would be uncompetitive but that was completely okay!
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| Moon Dog is on the right, flying the One Good Sail. |
After a somewhat leisurely downwind start in light air,
the One Good Sail was hoisted and Moon
Dog actually passed a couple of boats while holding steady with some
others. This didn’t last, though, and things got much worse when the spinnaker
take-down took a little too long, leaving Moon
Dog farther south of the West Point buoy than desirable and creating a few
white-knuckle moments for Michael at the helm. By the time Moon Dog was pointed back north, we were either dead last or close
to it.
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| Moon Dog battled Cricket for a while until the bigger boat pulled ahead for good. |
Upwind, Moon Dog
is especially slow and, even though the wind was building, it seemed to take
forever to reach the Meadow Point buoy, the flooding current not helping with
that. Once around, it was time for a lively close reach across the Sound, the
wind rising into the 20 knot range. This was too much for the genoa and, given
the challenges of swapping sails on the roller-furler, we elected just to roll
up some of the sail to make it smaller. This made things manageable but it was
still a wild ride!
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| Moon Dog is near the right end of the raft-up. |
By the time Moon
Dog arrived at the finish, the Committee Boat had pulled up anchor to join
the raft-up in Port Madison. Moon Dog
quickly dropped (or rolled) sails and headed for the raft-up as well, enjoying
some respite from the wind and the warmth of the sun. After a late lunch and
some HBRs, it was time to head back. The wind was, if anything, even stronger and
the genoa was more than sufficient all by itself to propel Moon Dog to hull speed and beyond for a nice romp back to Shilshole.
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| Two cruise ships came through on the return trip to Shilshole. |
