THE GOOD BUCK

We made it to Inverness! Wendy was having a bit of terror when I suddenly questioned whether the insurance worked the same on her courtesy car. If they had only insured her to drive, without me as named driver, she would have had to drive the six and half hours here. No, it’s all the same, I’m good to drive.

It’s a nice car they’ve given us, a ’20 plate Skoda. Wendy hates it. Since passing her test she’s only driven her Mini, so going from a diesel 1.6 to a litre petrol, with a different bite on the clutch and a slightly different feel, and having to do the adjustment on fast, very bendy, wet, unfamiliar roads is a bit much for her. I reckon if she’d have just been trundling back and to to work, cutting her usual groove, she’s have been fine and really quite liked the Skoda.

I drove us here, we went into Inverness to pick up my race pack for the marathon then we drove to our holiday chalet. It’s really nice. Comfy, quiet, and has heating, which is an imperative as we’ve gone from long, long, warm summer into a cold, wet Scottish autumn. It’s weird though. They’ve got underfoor heating. So it takes hours to warm the pipes up and for the heat to get the room toasty, then suddenly you are lathered, you turn the heat off and it takes many hours for the pipes to cool and stop roasting you alive. Not an ideal system, really.

I’ve not updated my blog because I was waiting for a conclusion to the boat debacle. It’s not quite there, but I can hopefully finish it off tomorrow.

I went back, all full of good plans, to get the boat, throw it on the roof rack and be sailing the same day, last Sunday afternoon. I fitted the roof bars in the morning. They attach by an arm on each side hooking under the roof gutter and a screw to tension them up to the feet actually on the roof. OK. The roof gutter didn’t look that sturdy so rather than ruin Wendy’s car I just fastened them to the minimum, using the small arm of the allen key so I didn’t exert too much pressure. Epic fail, right there.

I got to the guy’s house and it took both of us to carry the boat out to the car. He said, contrary to everything I’ve read, to put the boat on transom to the front of the car, because the trailer would sit on top of it, and the handle would obscure you view if it was over the windscreen. The thing is, the boat is shaped so that water, and air, flow from prow to stern. I’m fairly sure that was a pretty big fail as well.

I’ve had a bit of a relapse with the obsessive shopping thing.

It’s only three weeks until we go away to Loch Ness, a huge body of water, ideal for sailing if you can avoid the monster. I want to sail! I looked all over the internet, but I can’t find anywhere that rents sailing boats. So I set to looking at buying a boat.

I know, I know. *sigh*

After the first morning of my sailing training, and capsizing 5 times, things got a bit better. The second day there was hardly any wind, so we were basically practicing the drills in slo-mo. Then it got so becalmed we couldn’t even return to shore and the motorboat had to tow us back in. It was a very frustrating day, but it meant that when we got some decent wind on the third day I had an idea what I was doing.

There were some full-on blasts that kept blowing up, so you had to lean right out of the boat to stop it getting blown over. Which also meant it felt like you were going really fast. I enjoyed that bit a lot. The thing is, when you are sailing away from the wind you want the sail out at 90 degrees to the boat, which means you have to let out a ton of the rope (mainsheet) that controls the sail. Then when you turn it around to sail towards the wind you have to pull the sail in tight. What kept happening with me was all that loose mainsheet kept getting caught around my transom (rear of boat). On several occasions this meant I was suddenly flying along, sail fully powered up, boat tipping over, with no way of letting the sail out. So seconds away from another capsize. Happily I’d learnt enough to throw the rudder over and steer fully into the wind to depower the sail. Then you have to lay over the boat and free the mainsheet, in doing so lose the tiller so the sail swings around again, duck under the boom, grab the tiller, and the mainsheet had caught on my transom again! AAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!

I ended up spinning round twice, which is ducking under the boom 4 times, before I had a working mainsheet and tiller. This was while the boat was heeling over from side to side, trying to capsize.

I’ve started at my sailing club. I went to help out on Sunday, just helping take boat times on the races and inputting the data into the computer. Today I did my first lesson.

I think I was wise to take lessons. I capsized it 5 times in the morning session. The rudder is so sensitive! You push it a little bit and the boat goes everywhere. Not a problem in a straight line, but you have to tack upwind so you are swiveling around, while ducking under the swinging boom, and changing sides of the boat, then trying to steer with the tiller extension behind your back until you can swap hands. As with learning to drive anything, it’s a lot of things to be concentrating on at once.

After the dinner break we went back out on a tougher course and I was fine. Once you’ve got the basics you can relax enough to see what is starting to go wrong and correct it. The good thing is I am now a master of the capsize drill for righting the boat. That bit holds no fear for me anymore.