Our hydraulic steering was deemed (and seemed) "fixed" by Svenson's late Friday, so we decided to do a sea trial on Saturday and perhaps catch an America's Cup race.
Success on the first: the steering worked fine, even with weather helm while sailing (admittedly, we only had 10-15 knots of wind, so not much weather helm). Yeah! It turned out to be a nice sail out under the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge along treasure Island. Tons of boats out for the AC race.
 |
| Sailing towards SF Bay Bridge |
 |
| Happy Admiral -- the steering works! |
 |
| Skipper is happy too! |
As for the AC 72 racing... as usual, the race was postponed because of weather. Previous cancellations were because of "too much" wind (25 knots corrected for current is max), or because the race took more than 40 minutes (not enough wind). Saturday it was because the wind was in the wrong direction. Huh? We had a nice sail; seemed fine to us.
 |
| Emirates-NZ AC72 speeding back to base (outpacing the speed boats!) |
The AC 72s are pretty spectacular -- more like airplanes on the water -- but seaworthy they are not. Too many postponed and abandoned races due to "weather". The America's Cup will become interesting again if/when it returns to its roots.
Back in Alameda, we are provisioning today and will settle-up with Svenson's Monday morning and actually try to go cruising in SF Bay Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment