[Rhodes22-list] New Sailing Experience

[Brad Haslett]

Today was an awesome day for sailing in West Tennessee.  The sun was
shining, temperature was in the high sixties, and 15 to 20 knots of wind
blew for most of the day.  Fan invited a Chinese couple and their 10 and 12
year old boys for their first sailing experience.  My boat is easy enough to
single-hand, but the cockpit is actually smaller than a Rhodes-22 and
getting around the wheel to man the jenny can get cumbersome with more than
a couple of people on board.  The first few  miles out of my marina is a
narrow channel with lots of turns and it is a PITA to tack with both sails
until the channel widens anyway. We were doing five knots or so on the main
only and I was pretty happy. The 12 year old is an academic nerd so I
started explaining how the sail produced lift.  I should have known I was in
trouble by the book he was reading, "Building Blocks of the Universe" by
Issac Asimov.  He stared in on Bernoulli's Theory and I'm thinking to
myself, "they teach that in middle school"?  There was a regatta going on in
the main channel and the youngest asks, "why do all those boats have two
sails and you only have one".  I did my best to explain that I actually have
two sails without revealing it was too much hassle with all the people on
board to fly the jenny.  That didn't work so out comes the jenny.  On the
return leg back to the marina I furled the jenny and put the father at the
helm so I could start tidying things up.  Then hell broke loose.

"What is that chemical"?

"What chemical"?

"That chemical I just sprayed"?

Holy shit, the 12 year old somehow discharged the fire extinguisher mounted
just inside the companionway.  Cora was sleeping on one of the salon berths
and I could barely see her.  I jumped into the cabin, threw Cora up to
cockpit, and jumped there myself.  If you've never seen a dry chemical fire
extinguisher discharged before, trust me, it produces a cloud of dust.  The
cabin sole was covered in the stuff.  Then the 12 year old asked how much
further we had to go because he was bored. I was about to ask him the
chemical composition of the stuff he was about to be drowned in when Fan
gave me one of those, "it isn't worth going to prison over" looks.

We managed to get the cabin sole cleaned in about 30 minutes, which come to
think of it, needed mopped anyway.  It was a pleasant sail despite the
incident.  I'm sure this kid will make a great professor of something some
day.  I can assure you he won't learn to sail or fly on my watch!

Brad