A day at the Beach

Well, avid readers, my trailer is still at the shop. The parts were fabricated, but not yet back from the galvanizers in Utica yet. So the move get's postponed again. I do not yet have an idea of when I will actually get this boat home. I'm back to wondering if I should just motor it up the canal and pull it out on a trailer when I get it home. But that is not the point of today's post. Oh no, today's post is much more exciting and interesting.
This past Friday (the 19th) my siblings and I, and one friend, all took a day trip up to Lake Ontario. We started off they day with an 0900 departure. The weather was cool, but scheduled to warm up, and a light to moderate drizzle of rain was falling intermittently. Our first stop of the day was a trip to Oswego Harbor to view the Nina and the Pinta replica ships that were docked there for the latter part of the week.
The Nina and Pinta are accurate reproductions of two of the ships Columbus took on his voyage to the New World. The ships themselves were OK. Not much to see. I'm still upset we weren't allowed below; that's where all the cool stuff is anyways. Still they were just wooden planked ships, two decks (three if your count the raised quarterdeck)pretty open and surprisingly small. I find it very hard to believe that someone thought it smart to go to sea in such vessels. Then again, I am contemplating sailing Cassandra to God only knows where and she's a third the size of these ships. Needless to say, my sister and her friend were less than thrilled about the whole thing.
Our second stop, where we planned to spend the rest of the day, was Southwick Beach State Park. Located on the sandy Eastern shore of Lake Ontario Southwick Beach is usually a busy place for families and individuals to enjoy the lake. Such was not the case when we arrived. The wind was blowing somewhere around 6 knots and the water looked a little ominous. The beach was still wet from the rain storms we'd had that morning and the wasn't another vehicle or person to be seen. It was a little spooky walking down a deserted beach. It felt like, well, like we were doing something wrong just being there. I managed to get over that feeling though, and by the end of the day there were about four other cars in the parking lot.
Now, it has been a dream of my to get my PD Racer Adra out onto some real water. I was sort of expecting to do Oneida lake first, but the chance presented itself so I threw Adra into the truck and took her along for the day. Pulling a 110 pound boat across a sandy beach by myself was tiring, to say the least. I managed to sail around for 15 minutes or so before my GPS died, but I didn't feel like trying to fight back out across the sand bar and surf that characterizes the east coast of Lake Ontario, so I kept going. The wind was from the Northwest so I tacked my way up the shoreline to a spot where we rented a summer cottage when I was younger. I would have gone longer, but some darker clouds were skirting the shore in the east and I decided it was better to play things safe and head in until they either did something, or cleared up. I got back just in time to help cook lunch, hot dogs. After lunch the weather had cleared significantly and after popping some new AA's into my GPS I headed back out. I logged over 5 miles in three hours that day and I don't think I could have been happier, unless maybe I could have just kept going instead of turning around and heading back to the beach at the end of the day.
Adra took the larger waves pretty well. The only sign of any fatigue was at the mast step where some excessive wear was becoming a problem. I'll add a mast wedge at the partner to see what that does for it.
All in all, it was a good day. I was getting a bit tired by the end and had a hard time keeping my eyes open, partly because of the sun and partly because I had gotten up at 0800 that morning. Dragging the boat back up the beach was even worse since the sand had dried out since that morning. The "up" part of the equation didn't help much either. I slept well that night and am still a little sore from dragging the boat through the sand. Now if I can just get Cassandra home I can work on that "and just keep going" part. :D