Sailing in the Bay

On Wednesday, I posted Out in the Bay, in which my father and I took Wren out for a sail.

Wren is a 15 foot, two masted, open seating sailboat. She has a center board and an electric outboard motor. The outboard battery was especially heavy and needed to be hoisted out and over the stern to be fit in place.

The mainsail is rigged with lines to allow raising and lowering while still seated aft near the tiller. The main is complimented by a roller-furling jib and mizen. The mizen also rolls up, but manually.

A single line going out the stern was used to control the aft sail, which was connected to a permanent aft sprit extending out past the tiller. I am told the position of the sprit and the mizen spar make for better runs on some tacks.

With the wind to port the mizen sail could not fill entirely due to pressure from its spar. On the other tack however, it filled out nicely.

The weather report had been mixed and somewhat uncertain. As we motored out past the entrance to Point Hudson marina there was a light shower from passing a cloud.

My father set the jib and mizen and had me pull on some lines to hoist the mainsail. It stuck momentarily as one of the sail ties which had not been removed. With the line cleared, the main was raised fully and set into place.

It’s a gaff-rig like our second boat Anares, the navy whale boat. I will have to write about all of my father’s boats in another post.

There wasn’t much wind initially. We could see the steam rising straight up, down at the far end of the bay from the paper mill. So we motored out further into the bay until we hit a spot of wind.

Eventually a stronger breeze presented itself and the motor was cut. We had a nice sail and got to see the ferry boat crossing from PT to Bainbridge.

The sun broke out from behind some cloud cover and warmed our faces. The earlier rainshower had generated a rainbow and as we shifted our position we began to see it was a double rainbow.

We continued for awhile across the bay under sail, but the wind lessened. After the sun disappeared behind the clouds again I asked to turn back for the harbor.

My father remarked that we likely could have made it to Rat Island. But I wasn’t quite up for that long a journey, possibly under power for a considerable portion.

On the return journey the ferry was making its trip back after depositing its passengers at Bainbridge and picking up travelers bound for Port Townsend. As our position shifted and the ferry moved closer it became apparent that the ferry would pass under the rainbows.

I timed my shot but forgot to enable the high resolution shooting mode on my phone. Even so I got some nice pictures of the ferry passing through the end of the rainbow.