It was a relatively calm, sunny Thursday evening on Puget Sound marking the return of crewed sailing to One Life USA-26. It could have been nasty weather and it still would have bene glorious. Hard to express how much I missed these folks and sailing with crew.
Here in Seattle, we advanced to “Phase 1.5”, largely focused on opening up outdoor recreation with a smattering of low-occupancy service and restaurant businesses. The rules are so vague they allow for various interpretations about sailing. You can read mine in the prior blog post or on Scuttlebutt, where it was shared with the broader sailing community.
For One Life, our rules are everyone wears a mask, stay as socially distant on the boat as maneuvers allow, only one person below at a time, and (most importantly) a committment from everyone to bow out if there is any chance of exposure and to notify me if they’ve been exposed or tested positive.
It was a magical sail for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the total shock to see this:
Unbelievably, making its way north in the outbound shipping lane was M/V Undine, the boat shipping boat responsible for delivering One Life seven months ago (to the day). You honestly could have knocked me over with a feather.
I took it as some sort of karmic blessing on the whole day, which made the day much sweeter than it already was. I only wish I would have had the presence of mind to hail Undine and thank them for delivering One Life to me safe and sound. Perhaps next time.
This was the first time since March the racing sails were on. Kris and I have sailed quite a bit this spring with the crusing main and J3, and have been very happy with One Life’s performance. She’s a whole different boat with the race main and J1, though.
I didn’t copy across a lot of the ~3 hour video below, but for what I did you can see she heels a lot more even in this lighter breeze. She’s also, naturally, quicker to accelerate. There’s clearly going to be another learning curve with this set of sails, and I’m really looking forward to learning more with the crew aboard.
We were certainly rusty. The hoist was pretty painless, but the douse was… Let’s just say the video will stay amongst the crew as a learning experience. No shrimping or anything, but I’m glad we’re practicing.
I had some trouble with the VIRB 360 not capturing the entire set of GPS data, so the boat metrics mostly die out towards the end of the video. Apologies to the data heads amongst the blog readership for that.
Here’s a few minutes of video documenting The Return of the Crew! As always, thanks for visiting!