First Time Out With Udara Tanda

[Johann]

Hello All,
We finally got Udara Tanda completed enough for her inaugural launch and took advantage of a favorable wind and lots of sun in the Tampa Bay area.

The first-sail chronicles of a newbee...

The morning started off at 7:00, and things worked out pretty well. We made it to the ramp by about 7:30 and spent a good 45 minutes rigging her up. Before we were able to step the mast, a City of Tampa police officer drove up and commented on our rig, because he had a Com-Pac once upon a time and the fact that we were pulling a sailboat with a Dodge Magnum had caught his eye. After exchanging pleasantries, he drove off and we continued work on stepping the mast. We clipped the jib halyard onto the forestay chainplate then wrapped the halyard 5 feet from the bitter end around the winch that's mounted to the mast to create a poor-man's lift to stand the mast up. This made the job easy and fast. The rigging wasn't too bad and we were soon ready to start backing down the ramp.

I had made up a tongue extension that uses a pair of 2-inch balls and 2 hitch couplers to make a quick release. This is a link to the beginning of the latest images (21-27) I just uploaded.

http://com-pacowners.com/gallery2/displayimage.php?album=26&pos=20

Everything worked as well as could be as expected and soon, we were motoring down the waterway. At first thought, I was going to go under the Gandy bridge and try my hand at sailing between the Gandy and the Howard Frankland bridges, but the water was too choppy and the wind was gusty and very unstable for a newbee like me, once we got out to the other side. I spun the boat around real quick and went back under the Gandy to work on setting the sails on the lee side of the bridge. We dropped anchor (the daughter received a rope burn when she was paying out the anchor rode, then suddenly tried to hold the boat in station while I still had it in reverse to back down off the anchor to increase the scope of the rode).

We finally got our act together and hoisted both sails, then headed south to see if we could make it to the Saint Pete Pier, home of next week's Strictly Sail show. To shorten the story some, the sailing was fine, the wind was about 10 knots gusting to 15, and I decided to give her full sail without reefing to see how she handled. Considering my last sailing experience was at the age of 18 on a sixteen-foot Hobie Cat, I did have to shake out the rust and remember how to adjust the sails for best performance. I do have to admit, I need to work on tacking, as I blew 2 of them as I was coming about and ended up in irons, wishing I would be blown one way or the other to catch the mind. Need to work on that... The boat handled very well and would easily round up if I did something wrong, trim-wise. There was a tense moment when we had to take on a monster wake (6-7 foot tall) from a twin turbo diesel behemoth that didn't even think about slowing down as he passed us, but the waves were cut down nicely with a minimum of splash. As a matter of fact, the wakes from passing motorboats were no problem at all.

We didn't really make our objective of Saint Pete Pier, but we did get within about a mile when I realized we needed to head back because we would need to work a bit harder to make headway. This is when I experienced a close reach point of sail where we were about 45 degrees or so off of the wind and did pretty good. About half way back, the wind died down to nothing, and lacking a spinnaker, genoa and enough experience, we doused the sails, fired up the outboard and headed back in. Surprisingly, it took another one and one-half hour to make it back to our launch point. I might be wrong, but it seems to me like we made much better time under sail than we did under power.

So, after 6 hours of time on the salt, sandwiches built in the wife's lap while under way, 5 porpoises spotted on the way and a plan to sail no more than 2 hours (right!), the shakedown cruise can be considered something of a success.

We really love the boat and have found her to be everything we wanted and then some.

Johann.

[B.Hart]

Congrats on your first sail, glad it was great. I use to keep a sail boat at salt ceek in St Pete and have had many a sunset sail on tampabay. I hope to bring my 16 to tampabay to sail, but am spoiled by freshwater here in central florida. Salt water is so hard on trailers, hope to see you on the bay one day.                               Bill

[Johann]

Hello there!

Thanks for the congrats. Salt Creek, that's south of the general aviation field there-abouts, isn't it? We almost made it that far south from the Gandy Bridge on our first time out, I'm hoping to go further and wrap around to the spoil islands just south of Davis Island next time.

Perhaps we'll 'cross tack' sometime in life, one never knows..

'Til then, C-U on the message board.

Johann.