28 May 2007

A couple of weeks ago a Tornado hit the sailing club destroying my first boat. Because this was the beginning of the season I set about immediately looking for a replacement. Eventually I bought a Wayfarer dinghy. It's old but seaworthy and although it needs some maintenance work I sailed her the day after I bought her last weekend. This is a picture of my first minutes sailing her with Neil, a friend who is a good sailer and there to give guidance if needed. The Wayfarer is one and half times the size of the Mirror and develops much more power. After about 30 minutes we swapped crews to have his 11 year old son as my crew [which has become our normal crewing arrangement].

Oh and yes, the sails are filthy because the boat had not been sailed for a few years!

Last Saturday I took my youngest son and a couple of friends out sailing in her. We had a great time. Later in the day I did a minimal amount of the maintenance needed [changing the main sheet to original centre Wayfarer layout from a somewhat difficult to control end of boom main sheet arrangement for the sailors amongst you] ready for today...

This week in Larnaka is the celebration of Kataklismos, which is a rememberance of the flood when Noah, his sons and animals were saved. So logically I suppose, on the Monday of Kataklismos the sailing club has a regatta where we all sail round to the main Finikoudes sea front of Larnaka. Here's the club group picture I took. There are only two English families in the club, all the rest are Cypriot. The club is sponsored by McDonalds for this, so you can guess where we had lunch! You can probably see the McDonalds t-shirts on some of the members.

Among the flotilla we had three knock downs and a couple of capsizes on the mini-cruise, fortunately we were not one of them. I was sailing very conservatively, I had hurt my back slightly a day or so before and decided that I did not want to practice capsize drill today!

Sailing conservatively meant that there were only two other boats arriving after me on the outward leg and we were the last dinghy back on the return leg. Admittedly the club boats are 470s and Lasers so even if I was sailing hard I could not have caught them up. Anyway it was great fun.

This is the Google Earth map to show our route. The zig-zag at the top is sailing back and forth waiting for the rest of the flotilla. Somehow the GPS lost some of the track so there are gaps. Oh well... interesting anyhow. We sailed 11 nautical miles today.