Sailing at Elephant Butte Lake, Sunday, January 25, 2009

Etchells Constellation. After some comic-opera mis-communications, Zorro wound up with Blondie and a boyfriend on board, both of whom were unprepared for conditions on the water when the winds picked up.

Fickle winds made trimming the chute a frustrating exercise for a while during Cornhusker's solo sail on Sunday. Later on the winds came up even stronger than on Saturday, gusting into the 25-mph range with steady winds exceeding 20 mph.





Look ma, we can even sail dead downwind backwards!

We sailed around the lake for a while with Cornhusker and Zorro, then sailed to the courtesy dock near Marina del Sur. We dumped sails a bit too soon and fell short of the dock (which is still much better than ramming it because of going way too fast). The winds were too strong to let us scull or paddle to the dock, so we raised the jib and used it to sail to the courtesy dock. Then we had to wait quite a while for the winds to settle down; there was just too much wind to try to put our non-motorized thirty-foot keelboat on a trailer. So, we returned to Rock Canyon Marina, where Husker had returned with her boat, and visited with the marina staff, Ron, Lance, and marina co-owner Neal. I took a kayak out into the choppy water and whitecaps for a bit of exercise and play time while waiting for Constellation to return to the marina, which it eventually did with a soggy, chilled crew. Then we had lunch with Zorro, Blondie, and Matt. Returning to the ramp area, we found that the winds had moderated, so Carol Anne and I were able to retrieve the boat. We faced one additional challenge, however; the lot truck we used to haul Black Magic to the mast-up lot had no headlights.