Ellie Christens Spindrift

We finally bought a sailboat and I have barely been able to spend any time on it.  I took the ladies out tonight while Cristin works through her food poisoning which just might have been caused by her eating a salmon burger at Phili airport.  A salmon that spent a year or two in some murky Chinese pond only to be suffocated, filleted, and shipped halfway around the world to be served in PHL terminal B.  I learned a few lessons on our light wind outing tonight.  The first was to not put the mainsail up at the mooring.  I had been warned by another J28 owner about the unstable sway that gets induced at the mooring.  With the main up this turns into full on tacking back and forth.  I then made the mistake of deciding to just throw us off the mooring and we preceded to float back over the mooring lead and by some miracle it did not get hung up in the prop shaft or keel.

We sailed under main out into Buzzards Bay and Ellie informed me around the time we hit the second nun that she had to go the bathroom, go poop to be precise.  This put my in a pickle because in addition to the thru-hulls not being open, Ellie does not yet wipe herself.  My first inkling was to hand Phoebe the wheel but she instantly became distraught when I told her to keep the heading on a boat that was probably two miles away.  She felt a crash was imminent and I saw the tears coming.  My second approach was to pull the main down and then drift.  In theory we have autopilot, but that doesn’t work for reasons I have yet to determine.  I could also have pulled out some jib and hove to but the wind was so light I was skeptical that this would work.  We all went below and Ellie christened the potty and then we went back to the cockpit and reset.  The wind was very light but I didn’t detect any heeling aversion in Phoebe which is good.   The kids were getting a little bored so I let them play Parry Grip via the nice bluetooth system that the boat came with.   It was a solid experience but it made me realize that my sailing along with them will be confined to low double digits wind speeds until one of them can really take the helm.  I also need to fix the autopilot.