First sail this season

[Cevin c Taylor]

I went out last weekend for a sail on Ford Lake in my '83 CP16.  The lake is about 3 miles long and a mile or so wide.  It was pretty windy for what I'm used to - probably 15-20 MPH winds, with stronger gusts.  I went with a buddy that has wanted to go out sailing for a while.  He had sailed sunfishes quite a bit, and had been out once with me on my boat when there was almost no wind.  Given his limited opportunities to sail, I let him take the tiller the entire time.  It was good to be a passenger for a change.  The long part of the lake is EW, and the wind was directly out of the west.  It took us over an hour to make the three miles from the launch to the west end of the lake, and then only about 15-20 min to cover the return distance on a run.  We managed to make the entire trip back wing on wing, which was the longest I've ever done that.

One a side note, I built a furler using Mandolinut's plans (with a few mods), and this was my first time using it.  It worked great!  The only problem was that I had not had time to put a fairlead on the deck, and so when the line rolled up, it went below the drum on the furler, but I expected that.  I'll have to post some pics of the setup.  I've putting a lazy jack system on to avoid the annoying problem of having the sail in the cockpit when lowered.  Rather than try sailing up to the dock, we dropped sail about 40 yards out and used the 32 lb thrust trolling motor to glide up to the dock.  All in all, a great day.

[InertBert]

Sounds wonderful.  We'd love to see the furling set up when you get time.  What did your friend think of the handling of the CP16 as compared to a sunfish?

[Cevin c Taylor]

He was impressed with the stability. When we got caught by gusts, he kept saying "I would have gone over in the Sunfish from that."