Your first sailing experience

[moctrams]

How could I forget my first sail over 22 years ago? Like most would be sailors, I looked at the beautiful white sails out on the Chesapeake Bay and saw only the fun part. So, I decided I would get the process moving by buying a boat slip at the Flag Harbor Yacht Haven in Long Beach, Md. and save up for a sailboat. In the meantime I studied every sailing book I could get my hands on, including the “Theory of Sailâ€

[Kevin Kaldenbach]

My wife and I had our first sailing experience on July 5th of 2008. We had been dreaming about having a sailboat and spent our spare time admiring boats. We were doing just that when we were invited to go on a race that afternoon. It was a windy day and they needed some ballast to hang off of the side of the J 80 sailboat. On that day the boat breached when the spinnaker did not deploy correctly and the crew said we were baptized by fire. Afterwards I told my wife I loved it. She did not know what to think. A few days later one of the guys we met took us out on his Irwin CC. It was a almost still day but the Genoa filled and took us on a leisurely stroll across the lake. My wife was hooked. Since July we have been sailing every chance we get.

[Stan W.]

I started sailing when I was about 9 years old. The location was the backside of Barnegat Light on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, where my family had a little beach house for a few years. My father used to regale my younger brother and me with apocryphal stories about his childhood sailing adventures and, one day, he decided we should have a sailboat too. He answered an ad in the local paper and came home with a little boat on top of the family wagon. As I recall, it cost $80. Knowing what I know now, it was an 8 foot pram and I’m pretty sure it was British with a cold-molded mahogany plywood hull. It was painted white on the outside and finished bright on the inside. It had a gunter rig and an Egyptian cotton sail. In my mind’s eye, it was soft-chined at the bow and hard-chined at the stern, but it’s hard now to see how that could have been possible. In hindsight, it was obviously someone’s old tender, but to me it was a grand little yacht in its own right. Dad’s only instruction was to push the tiller left to go right and vice-versa, and to trim the sail by pulling it in just to the point where it stopped luffing. Beyond that, we were pretty much self-taught. In truth, it didn’t sail all that well and often would drift backwards when trying to beat into the wind and against the tide. In compensation, it was great fun to row. We knew nothing of Mole or Ratty in those days, but we spent countless hours “messing aboutâ€

[Steve Darwin]

I'd been taken out sailing in family boats since I was small, but when I was about 14 (1963) my brother got a wooden "Candy" class cat boat (Marconi-rigged). That boat sailed me as often as I sailed it, but once you learn to sail a cat boat, like a Beetle cat, you can sail just about anything. The simple rig does not mean simple to sail. When I reached high-school age, my dad bought a wooden Star class boat with a huge but fragile cotton sail. (I can still see Mr. Smith rolling his eyes every time I came into his Fairhaven loft to get another patch.) I and my friends sailed that boat all over Buzzards Bay until it went down in a storm.

[Duncan]

....with the styrofoam hull. I think my Mom paid about $79 for it back in the mid 1960's as a gift to my Dad. This is a picture I found on the web. Ours had a red and white nylon sail. The hull was all styrofoam but my Dad gave it a coat of fiberglass after a few years. It centerboard and rudder were replaced a few times while we owned it.

My first was a Flying Junior at camp (I was 10). They were a blast. The key piece of instruction was "don't gybe", so of course we did that as soon as we figured it out.
I can still picture exactly what it feels like to capsize an FJ, probably because we did it as often as we could.



With respect to the Snark, I had never sailed one until about five years ago. After my father died, though, I went down to make sure things were ok at the family cottage, and I discovered a Snark (that we had never used) stashed under the guest cabin.

The mice had eaten big holes in the sail, so I rigged some bedsheet patches at first. She sailed so smartly that I was inspired to make a polytarp sail soon afterwards:



Around this time, I discovered the original 1960's documents lying in a drawer. These included instructions for fiberglassing the styrofoam hull (epoxy only, polyester resin melts the foam). So I glassed the hull, painted her Forest Green, and varnished up the daggerboard and rudder

The polytarp sail wasn't as bad as the mouse-eaten one, but it was stretchy, and that made her hard to handle when gusts came up.

A friend wrote me to say she had a brand-new, never-used Snark sail. The story was that her father had been a Pepsi dealer, and they would give $99 Snarks as an incentive for store displays. He ended up with "one extra", but the catch was that it was just a lot of parts in a box, and her father knew nothing about sailboats. Karla was 11 at the time, so the chance at building her own boat, and figuring out how to sail it (without any parental expertise), was irresistible!

Anyway, to make a long story shorter, Karla's Snark is long gone, but she discovered a brand-spankin-new 'extra' sail up in the attic on a visit home. So, the Snark sails again, with her brand-new "Mountain Dew" promotional sail:



And her new skipper is just delighted:

[winthrop fisher]

how is ever one..

sorry i have been gone so long....

my first time on own family sail boat was in darn ct in 1961 at 4 years old and with five people on board.

the boat was all open sloop and at the time we had a small dog on board that would jump over board for a swim.

we would tack back to get him back on board.

we sailed ever weekend.

nice to be back and have a nice holiday......winthrop

[Oswego John]

Hey Winthrop,

Good to hear from you again. We missed you and what you have to say.

Don't be a stranger for so long.

Keep on sailing,
O J

[winthrop fisher]

hi O.J.

so how have you been?

we have been in sweden sense last feb 08 with my wife's company,
at their expense for ever thing air fare, apartment, food.

business trip for my wife...

we just got back a week ago and relaxing for the next few weeks.

enjoy your holiday.....winthrop

[winthrop fisher]

thank you .....winthrop

[SurryMark]

Not sure I remember my first time, but my granddaughter Ella's was last June, in Moorhead City NC. A kind neighbor next to the rental house suggested we go out in their little sailing dinghy, which lacked mast, sail, daggerboard, and rudder. There was an oar, which we lashed to the transom through a convenient hole. There was an old shower curtain and some light line in the garage. So we sculled upwind a hundred yards or so in the inland waterway and I rigged myself up as the mast and yard for a square sail, with strings tied to the bottom two corners. After a little waffling we were off on a downwind experience with Ella handling the sheets and the steering oar and thrilled at our moving along with no strain at all, except, perhaps, to the yardarm. I'm totally looking forward to letting her hold the tiller on the new CD27 that I hope is ours and afloat next summer.

[Baysailer]

I didn't come from a sailing family but my friend Dave did. We worked in the same office and he would go into depth on the theory of sailing (engineers-go figure) so I knew how to sail in my mind long before I actually set sail. Ironically Dave didn't own a boat at the time so this went on for quite a time until his brother dropped off a Flying Scot. When we did finally go out on Oneida lake it was a raging day and Dave's main mission was to scare the #%$^ out of me. I was to busy seeing what I thought I knew in action to be scared off but I did get a bit sea sick after we touched back on land.

Dave moved but his dad Roland taught me how to sail with out actually getting in my sailboat. We'd talk and he'd give me things to do mostly what I called sailing with a broken boat, sail under main alone, jib alone, no rudder, no centerboard or only partially down, etc. I learned a lot form him and still have my first sailboat that I named after him after he passed on.

Fred B

[sloopjohnl]

1976 - my wife and i bought a wooden sailfish (sunfish with no footwell) and we taught ourselves how to sail (?) on Lake Nockamixon, PA and then we decided a weekend at the Annapolis Sailing School would be a good idea! first sail on a cape dory was on Lake Wallenpaupack, PA on a CD27 that was for sale that i could not afford at the time, but the owner invited me for a daysail anyhow. typical CD owner!

[tartansailor]

I borrowed a small dink located in a mountain lake with shifting wind.
I must have capsized at least a dozen times. Never got the hang of it that summer.

Dick