Shakedown weekend

[rfrance0718]

After 3 trips up here to get the boat launched, rigged, and cleaned we had the Oday ready to sail. Oh and part of the time was spent launching my brother's Pierson 26 and getting it ready to sail.
Tami and I headed up to Lake Erie Friday evening for a shakedown weekend. Unfortunately, yesterday's forecast was not great. It was nice in the morning with 10 knot Northerly, but it was scheduled to build all day with 26 knot Northeast gusts in the evening. There's a mooring field at Put-In-Bay, but it's kind of exposed to a Nor'easter. We decided to spend the day just sailing around the islands and head back to the marina for the night. The wind built as we sailed, and we were seeing 20 knot gusts by the time we headed in. We were sailing with a double reefed main and full (125) jib, and the boat did fine.  She seems to like a big heal, thanks to the relatively worthless wing keel. The helm is balanced, and the boat steers itself upwind with the tiller locked in the center. That was all good, except that Tami isn't crazy about climbing around with a 45 degree heal. She did enjoy a nice nap, wedged into the leeward settee, for one leg.
I would have told you that a locked tiller wouldn't work on a reach, but I accidently learned that it would. We sailed about 5 miles on a beam reach with the jib alone, and I thought, the auto helm was engaged. When we were getting ready to change course I noticed that it was just locked and had sailed that whole way with just bearing off slightly in the end. Who knew?
After we got in the breeze continued to build and the temperature dropped to the low 60s. We made a good choice. The wind howled all night, but we were snug and comfortable. It's pretty windy this morning, and supposed to build again during the day. We've had breakfast, are planning on making a few improvements, and we'll head home.
One improvement was to finally hook up my mast head lights appropriately. This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I never understood how they were supposed to work. Part of the issue was that while I had three leads coming out of the mast, I only had two wires going on to the circuit panel, just on or off. I finally figured out that you were supposed to have both fore and aft lights on for anchoring, and just the forward light on for steaming.  I ended up splitting the one lead and adding a line switch so that I could turn the aft light on or off. I had to mount the switch on a little junction box which is mounted on the cabin ceiling next to the compression post. So now I can turn the lights on at the circuit panel but have to take 2 steps over by the compression post to turn the aft light on or off. Good enough I say.
We also brought the main sail home to sew up the inboard end of the full batten pocket at the top. I looked up while we were sailing upwind on Saturday and the batten was poking about half its length out of the front of the pocket. I immediately lowered the sail to save the batten, saw that it was still there halfway down, but it was gone once it was all the way down. Tami's going to fix the pocket and I'll order a batten.
We've really worked our way down to the fine details and our little yacht is quite serviceable. We are looking forward to many weekends on her this summer. I'm able to go up during the week and sail even more.

[Spot]

Thanks for the report, sounds like a good time and good decisions and a nice repair to the lights.