NOPE! NOT YET!

       I am hopeful that this will be the week when Eric the Shaman finally has the time to fix the "iron genny." It is really annoying not to be out sailing on ABISHAG. I could get her off the mooring without much of a problem, it is getting back on the mooring. As Shakespeare was won't to say, "Aye, there's the rub."

     The "rub" is stopping at the right spot, the place where I cant get from the cockpit to the bow, grab the pickup stick and pull the pennants on the boat and secure them to the cleats. When you are mooring a boat without an engine, you don't have the relatively instant breaking power and direction control that you do when you have a working engine. One has to manipulate the sails rather perfectly the have her make the correct speed for it to happen.

     To stop a boat under sail and pick up a mooring, one has to know which way the wind is blowing and how hard. ABISHAG weighs a svelte 11 tons and when she is moving has a lot of kinetic energy: ie. she don't slow down quickly, doesn't stop on a dime. If you get too close to the pickup, you will drift by at speed. Try stopping 11 tons by hand! If you don't get close enough, you'll stop before you cna reach the pickup  and drift away.  It gets even more fun when you are dealing with any sort of current. IS it flowing in the same direction as the Wind? Then the boat will take longer to stop. Is it against the wind? The it will stop short. If the wind is blowing from the side, then you will be push away from the pickup and you miss it all together.

     You have to work out all these things ahead of time because if you mess up, when the mooring is not out in the middle of nowhere. It is smack dab in the middle of other moored boats and without a certain amount of speed you are without steerage control and you can easily whack another boat, or two. Unfortunately, ABISHAG, at slow speed, handles like a semi on an icy road and any impact is going to do some serious damage, not to her, but to the poor boat(s) she hits. Across an ocean, in bad weather, in a lot of winds and waves, ABISHAG is marvelous. In a tight mooring field, er... not so much.

AH! THE JOYS OF BOAT OWNERSHIP.