Maiden Voyage!

Well, the Ripple officially set sail this past Sunday. I managed to wrangle up two friends to crew for me, and we went out for an afternoon journey just west of the marina. My friend John who came along, coined this trip as the "figure shit out" trip, which was quite telling. 

The area just out from my marina is a busy commercial harbor (Vancouver Harbour) and sailing isn't permitted. So in order to put up any canvas, it's about a 25 minute putter out from under the Lions Gate bridge to Burrard Inlet. The most interesting part of that trip turned out to be the first 15 feet... getting out of my slip.

Our destination for the day

Now, as a bit of background for myself, I learned to sail dinghies at a young age, and made the jump to cruising boats when I moved to Vancouver about 11 years ago. All of my cruising experience came as crew for the Talofa Lee, a 50 ft Bermuda-rigged sloop out of West Vancouver. I like to think I became a pretty proficient helmsmen over my 6 years crewing aboard that boat. 

HOWEVER, up until Sunday, I had never sailed a boat with an outboard and rudder (Talofa Lee was inboard with a helm). On top of that, I took about a 4 year break from sailing ANYTHING after the Talofa Lee was sold... So needless to say, navigating the close quarters of my marina was quite the "trial by fire" situation. 

Exiting the marina after some stressful maneuvering

Didn't help that the previous owner had forgotten to mention that the outboard on the Ripple has a locking mechanism to lock it in the "down" position. Without that latch engaged, the whole engine kept rotating upwards whenever I gassed it in reverse. This would lift the prop out of the water, resulting in no propulsion and making quite the embarrassing sputtering noise.

(This whole debacle was witnessed by a power boater and his wife, watching silently from 20 feet away and no doubt chuckling to himself...)

Anyway, after a few hairy moments, we managed to get the Ripple pointed towards open water. 

Open water at last!

20 or so minutes later, we made our way under the Lions Gate Bridge and into Burrard Inlet. We managed to time slack tide pretty well, so there was almost no current in the narrows (which can kick up to 5-6 knots at peak tides!).

A new perspective of the Lions Gate Bridge

Once we made it into Burrard Inlet, it was time for some sailing. There wasn't much of a breeze at this point, but I really wanted to get the mainsail up, just to work through the process for the first time. Raising the main took a bit longer than normal for a few reasons. 

One, being the first time in about 4 years that I had done this, I was a bit rusty on the procedure. On top of that, Brett and John had never done this, so they were entirely foreign to whole thing. You forget just how many sailing terms there are until you're trying to walk someone completely new through something like raising a sail. 

However, after a bit of fussing, we got the main up. We didn't put out the genoa as it currently has a tear in it. Even so, we tacked our way back and forth just west of Stanley Park for an hour or so. So nice to be back on the water!

Sailing!

Eventually we decided to start making our way back toward the narrows. We had a bit of an exciting moment as a large container ship was steaming its way towards Vancouver Harbour and decided that we were in their way. A horn blast from a boat that size (even when she’s 5km away) certainly gets your attention in a hurry. I saw her coming from a long way off (not sure how you’d miss her!), but I suppose she wanted to make sure.

So we let her go by, rather than brave the narrows side by side. 25 minutes later were back at Mosquito Creek. I did a bit of low speed maneuver practice (with the engine locked down this time!) before heading for my slip. Docking went smoothly and the maiden voyage was complete!