Water craft (canoe)

Where to paddle?

You can cast me with the dreamers and see if I float!

For too long I've wanted to sail but done nothing about it! I hadn't realized how long I'd been dreaming (and talking) about it until I ran into a guy I used to work with who happened to ask me if I'd sailed around Australia yet!

"What?!" How did he know I'd been thinking about boats, sailing, the sea and fascinating exotic coasts lately?

When I asked, "What do you mean?", he just laughed and said, "You've been talking about that for years!"

Talk talk talk! That's about all I've done! Of course I haven't been in a position to just up stumps and set sail, I have responsibilities! But what good is just dreaming and boring people with 'one of these days' stories?

Well a few months ago I decided to do something about it and I bought my very first water going vessel! An old canoe from the tip shop!

It floats and paddles well but there aren't many places close to home that I can paddle it! So I'd been playing with the idea of turning it into an outrigger sailing canoe... I was getting pretty excited about how I might make it when the next step in my sailing life occurred. My wife suggested I could do a sailing course at one of the local Yacht clubs.

So last night I attended my first theory session and discovered there is quite a bit of physics involved with sailing a yacht! Suddenly the idea of chucking a few poles across the deck of my canoe, attaching a piece of polly pipe and erecting a couple of poles and a sheet (a sail not the piece of rope that controls the direction of the sail!), might get me into more trouble on the water than I'd expected! I learned about the significance of a keel and a whole bunch of other stuff that kind of blew my naive dream out of the water... or potentially onto a 'lee shore!'.

Yes marooned on a Lee Shore is where I could end up if I try to sail without a keel... Or capsized if I were to try to fix a sailboard mast to the hull of my vessel without any way of lowering the sail!

Ha already practical reality is taking the place of ignorant dreaming.. I hope as I continue through the course I will be able to maintain some of the romantic naivety that inspired me wonder about what could be just over the horizon!

Now I'm looking at the old canoe with fresh eyes!

Now I'm really pumped! They're only baby steps