I had a lot of new and different experiences today on Mothball one, some of the experiences were good, others not so much, but I ended the day with a smile. I went out this afternoon with 8-10 kts of breeze and quickly had my first new mothing adventure of the day. I was sailing towards the shore and knew there was a shallow spot somewhere. I was about to turn when I looked down and saw the bottom way too close. I quickly thought about whether it would be better to keep foiling and pray that I make it over the shallow spot or just eject and hope for the best, but about one second later the decision was made for me as the boat hit the ground and I was shot into the water. I stood up in the thigh deep water and was feeling pretty stupid, but after some inspection I realized that the damage was fairly minimal, just some scratched paint and a small crack at the end of the daggerboard box. Lucky. The wind was still nice so I just swam out to deeper water and took off again and kept sailing for another hour.
The wind started to die so I went in to take a break. The wind was forecast to come up later in the afternoon so I stuck around to wait for it. It took some time, but the wind finely came up late in the day. I sailed upwind with some good pace into the building breeze. The wind was blowing down the entire 30 mile length of Canyon Ferry Lake and with the wind increasing to 15 kts the waves started building quickly. I sailed upwind for about three miles and then turned around with the wind still increasing. By the time I was heading back down the lake the wind was gusting to 20-25 kts and the waves were getting quite big. This was the first time I’d ever sailed downwind in big waves. I hit a max speed of 19kts in the lumpy seas even with my scratched main foil. After launching over a big wave I did my first high-speed ventilation of the main foil and crashed rather dramatically. I crashed several more time before I figured out how to drive the waves to avoid the big breakers.
As I was getting back to the marina the wind had decreased to around 15 and the seas had flattened quite a bit. I had to make three jibes to make it back to the docks and I was hopeful that I could end this exciting sail with a foiling jibe. I went into the first jibe feeling good and the boat stayed flat and fast. I got to the other side in position and sheeted in and kept sailing. Yay! First foiling jibe = DONE! My next jibe didn’t go quite and well, but I was able to stay up on the last jibe too.
So it was quite an exciting day on many levels. I tried to ruin my boat, but didn’t, I sailed in big waves and survived, and I made two foiling jibes. Too bad this sailing season is almost over, this is getting fun!
