| I hooked
up with a boat hauler on uship.com, to bring the boat from Ohio to
Alameda. People in California frequently ask about sailing on
Lake Erie. The best I can say is: if San Francisco is a 9 out of 10 on
the Universal Sailing Scale, then Lake Erie is about a 4. This is
not to say that it's bad, it's just that the weather is extremely
unpredictable (even on a good day, especially on a good day, there's a
significant chance of thunderstorms and very high winds). A big
factor in my rating SF a 9 is consistency. The weather there
isn't
always great (it can be very chilly in summer) but at least it's
predictable, unlike most of the rest of the country where you're better
off flipping
a coin than watching a TV forecaster. It's one of the only
places where you can plan to go sailing next weekend, and almost always
actually go. When I first moved to California, a flyer circulated at work for the department's spring picnic. (Pre-Internet, which dates me, these things were actually printed on paper, that stuff we used to get from trees). I said to the woman, Mei, who was passing out the flyers, "June 14th. What's the rain date?" She gave me a blank look. "What's 'rain date'?" "Yes, what's the rain date?" "What's 'rain date'?" She was looking increasingly frustrated. It was one of those "Who's on first?" sort of moments: she had moved to California from another country and, while her English was probably better than mine, she had never lived anywhere in the U.S. except San Jose and simply had never heard the phrase before. "The rain date. When is the picnic if it rains on June 14th?" She said: "It's not going to rain on June 14th! It doesn't rain in California in June!" That's when I knew I was home. Many times, while sailing out of Sandusky Bay, I had the disconcerting experience of being less than a mile from a boat close hauled on the same tack and sailing in a completely different direction, or sailing in the same direction and on a completely different point of sail. I thought this only occurred in small mountain lakes until I saw it with my own eyes. There's also the frustrating experience of being totally becalmed and watching boats sail less than a mile away, but occasionally you have the opposite experience of sailing slowly past a fleet of still boats. In all, sailing on Lake Erie is a challenge, which is probably why several recent Olympic sailors have hailed from Ohio. Sometimes, though, you don't actually want a challenge. On those days in SF we could leave South Beach and scoot across to the Estuary, or east of Treasure Island, or just head south towards Hunter's Point, and we were guaranteed a relaxing sail. Other days we headed straight into the Slot for guaranteed thrills. On Lake Erie, you don't choose, it chooses for you. The other problem with Erie is that it's the shallowest of the Great Lakes. This combined with its 100-mile east-west fetch makes for some short, steep, nightmarish chop if the wind is in the wrong direction and if you happen to be in a very fast, very light displacement boat. Worse were the light air days when the huge powerboats would come out and churn it up. If you're from Sf, think of a 6-knot ebb moving out the Gate against a 25-knot northwesterly, and you get the idea, except it's the entire lake, not just one avoidable potato patch. One of the weaknesses of a small, light trimaran is that you tend to slam from one float to the other in a chop, especially under power, and the wind tended to be fluky on the lake so I was forced to motor more than I like. Granted, in a monohull you would probably be rolling just the same, but with more momentum, and without the jerk as the formerly airborne float hits the water. So we left the motor off unless we were completely becalmed and had to get home. Even in a couple of knots of breeze the Farrier will move along at a few knots, with the leeward hull skimming the water and the windward hull safely above the chop. Sometimes that was the most enjoyable sailing since Tanya could lie on the net reading and I could putter around the boat with the autopilot steering. Also, there were lots of knuckleheads on the lake, like the 6-pack fishing boat skipper who was "trawling", nobody at the helm, 7 guys clustered around the transom, dragging some kind of submerged box with no markings, no bouys, no dayshapes, which we tangled with while doing 16 knots. Yikes. Finally, there are the midges. Once Lake Erie was a mythical environmental dead zone: there was so much pollution that the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland actually caught on fire, so needless to say there weren't too many insects, fish, or birds. It's been cleaned up since, and with the cleanup have returned tiny flies that live as larvae in the mud for 17 years before hatching and descending on the coast to disrupt traffic, cause brownouts, interrupt baseball playoff games, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. They don't bite because they don't have mouths. They're just looking for someplace to land, and a boat is probably the closest thing in miles. We had literally thousands of them on the boat one day. All over our clothes, our skin, everything. They're also impervious to any known insect repellent. On the other hand, Erie beats trying to sail in, say, Kansas, hands down, and there aren't a whole lot of days on San Francisco Bay when you can't decide whether to take your t-shirt off. So I decided it would be better to sail the boat in San Francisco once in a while than to sail more frequently in Ohio. Because of the 100 mile trip to the lake, we only did 10 trips last summer, and I'm probably in SF for work more than 10 times a year, so if I could get a quick sail in each trip, I'd come out ahead. The only hitch on the trip to Alameda was when a wheel fell off the trailer. Apparently a bearing froze up and took the whole wheel assembly with it. Oops. I had greased the bearings and the driver had checked them frequently. He said they got warm but never hot. Maybe he was trying to make the last push to the destination and didn't check them the last time he filled up, but it's not his fault. Fortunately he found a gas station off I-80 in Fairfield that happened to be only 4 miles from the Suisun City Marina. My friend Paul rescued me by driving up from Dublin with a truck full of tools and replacing the bearing on the remaining wheel on the right side. When I got to Oakland, I borrowed Paul's Suburban, limped to the boat ramp with two of my brothers, launched the boat, towed the trailer by itself to Alameda, and motored the boat down. Because we caught an early Sunday ebb, it only took 6 hours under power, and we only used 4 gallons of gas. On the way I drilled and filled holes for the folding padeyes that we would use to hoist the boat at Alameda Marina, and installed the padeyes and backing plates. Now the boat is resting happily on trailer in the lot at Alameda, sans 1 wheel. |
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