We all slept in and by the time we finally got Belle dressed and ready the crane operator was there and ready to get our mast up, so Amy & Belle left for some much anticipated Mickey D’s (They also had a play land which was nice for Belle after being cooped up on the boat for the last few days in a row).If you have been reading this you know by now that this is our first boat and we are completely new to sailing. With that said I went about putting the mast up. I had planned to rewire the mast, put a new radio antenna on it, and replace a few lights prior to putting it up but I did not realize how difficult it was going to be to work on the mast while it was on the boat so none of this got done. If I had planned a bit better I would have called ahead and had Wardell’s order the parts I wanted and been ready… Oh well, they did offer light bulbs but when I looked at mine the bulbs appeared to be undamaged so I assume I simply have some wiring issues, more stuff for the fix it list. I decided to go ahead and put the mast back up without doing any of the above mentioned work. Our survey indicated that we needed to rebuild our mast step in the next few years and our local yard has a crane so I’ll take that opportunity to replace the lights, wind indicator, and antenna next year.
When I had called the day before I had stressed that we were not very experienced with out boat and would need some help with the mast & rigging the fellow on the phone told us no problem they get folks like us all the time.. We would be well taken care of. Well they really did not know or care to know much about sail boats so once he lifted the mast up I was on my own. I went about the task of figuring out where all the rigging went, put up the sails, and tried to guess how tight to make the stays. Overall Wardell’s was a pretty hand’s off operation. After about 4hrs of messing around I managed to get the boat back together pretty well and felt fairly confident about my work.
It was now a little past lunch time Amy and Belle had visited both museums (they really liked the carousal museum and said the staff was very friendly & knowledgeable) and were now hungry. I met them in town; we got some lunch and ice cream once again then headed back to the boat. Amy took a look at my work and seemed pretty happy with everything but the lazy jacks that I somehow had managed to twist up a bit but that was easily fixed. We made a few attempts at trying to find a good location to put the supports that had been built to hold the mast somewhere on the boat but decided in the end that they would just be in the way and if we ran into any bad weather would probably be more of a liability then an asset later on so we left them at Wardell’s where I’m sure he will be happy to sell them to the next guy that comes though looking for supports.
We decided that even though it was supposed to rain soon it was time to head out. We really did not want to spend another night at Wardell’s and wanted to stay somewhere that we could get right out to Lake Erie the next day. We traveled up the river & though the next few locks & various swing bridges then found a nice marina to tie up to that night. This was the first time I had attempted to pull into an actual boat slip rather then a wall and we were a bit nervous. It did not help that the finger piers were about 3-4 feet higher then the deck of our boat. Needless to say I botched it and did not give the boat enough power to get into the slip and with the rain and height of the doc Amy had a few problems getting the bow line tied up and we ended up sideways in the slip (luckily no one else was near us and we were in the last slip next to the wall). Fortunately the owner of the boat on the other side of us heard our struggling and came out in the rain to help. He turned out to be a really friendly fellow that was very into racing. I wish it would not have been raining as I’m sure he would have loved to have taken us out and provided a few sailing lessons while answering with some of my rigging questions.
We had hoped to get another hot meal but decided to skip trekking anywhere in the rain and settled for some Romen noodles on the boat that night.
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