First solo sailing trip: Bahia Honda

 We were invited to take a sailing trip with some friends to Bahia Honda. It's about 10 miles from basecamp (about an hours drive), which amounts to about 3 hours of sailing. We had beautiful conditions, ENE winds pushing us right for our destination. We went with a regatta of 27 ft. sailboats. There were four boats total.

"Sailing: the most expensive way invented by man to go really, really slowly". 

 We made it to Bahia Honda in the evening. We dropped anchor, and immediately lost steering on the boat. Our anchor hadn't stuck, so we were drifting around, unable to steer ourselves away from other anchored boats or the Seven Mile bridge. Dave, my usual hero, was able to fix it within twenty minutes. How did he know how to fix the steering on a sailboat? He had read about it. I'm engaged to Rain Man. Definitely.

After attempting to anchor twice, we managed to stick. Bahia Honda has soft sand and sea grass with ripping currents that switch direction. s/v Wee Happy had to re-anchor a few times as well. We all cooked a pot luck dinner and enjoyed a game of Rummy and Bullshit. (I won both games Ma, still got it! Much to Daves dismay!). In the picture above, we have Sara (blue hair) and Trevor on Earindil, Kristopher (white hat) and Lita (other white hat) on Wee Happy, and Wes (bald) on Gemini Dreams.

Our trip back was a little less easy. We were still facing ENE winds, which meant we had to fight our way back to Boot Key. It took us roughly an hour to get the hang of sailing into the wind, and effectively gained no ground (but lost no ground, either) in that hour. Once we figured out what to do and how to do it, we made better time. We tacked the whole way back (going in a zig-zagging pattern to catch the wind in our sails for a close beam reach, in other words, in an angle that allows the wind to hit our boat perpendicular). It works in enabling us to not have to rely on our motor to get back, but it's time consuming and redundant. At one point, we had to make an emergency tack due to a powerboat coming down on us. He was going ~30 mph, with his autopilot on - and never even saw us. If we hadn't taken evasive moves, he would have run us down and probably killed us. We're beginning to get a taste of why most sailors don't like powerboaters.