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| Patrick, Kenzie, Finn & Fjord in front of our 1980 Ericson 30 |
Story time:
Back in December I was doing my hourly scan of Craigslist to see if I could find anything. Lo and behold I see and ad for a 30' Ericson sloop for cheap...like MY price range cheap. I put it in my mind, and contacted the owners right away. After I dropped Kenzie and the boys off in Utah, I figured I would make the most of my airport run and check out the boat while I was down in town [Honolulu]. I saw the boat, it looked to be sold, but the previous owners lived aboard for nearly 4 years and it was covered in junk. The interior looked scary, there were empty prescription bottles everywhere, so many cigarete butts, and a few bongs lying around. Anyway, fast forward a few months. I kept tabs on the boat, waiting for when they would actually pull the trigger to sell it. Finally in May they were ready. I went down to scrape the bottom clean. As I worked on the boat, and they moved their stuff off, the guy started freaking out because I was getting too close to the through hulls and he was worried I'd cause a leak. That troubled me. I spent a couple hours chipping barnacles off of the bottom of the boat. It looked like an alien landscape! There were so many tube worms, crabs, and soft corals that I was pretty sure I saw some new species I had never witnessed in the coral reefs around the island. After cleaning it, we went back down the next day to hopefully sail it away to a new dock. In the end, we did all the paperwork and stayed at the Ke'ehi Small Boat Harbor temporarily for about 3 weeks. It was right under the airport takeoff zone, so it got kinda loud.
On our first sail out, we brought along some friends and decided to just sail the whole way. I swam a line out to a pillar in the bay, pulled the boat back and let us drift so we were pointing into the wind, then popped up the jib (which ended up being a tiny sail, almost a storm jib) and shoved off. We started sailing in the gusty weather...the wrong way. We headed back to a dock, almost bumped into another boat. Finally got her flipped around, and went sailing. It was all pretty uneventful, till we started coming back in. Other guys came out on their sailboat to rescue us. They respected me for trying to do it all with sail, but thought it was foolhardy with the kids aboard, and the reef being so close. The channel to get in and out of the harbor is about 500' wide, and very long. It takes a good half hour just to get OUT of the harbor. As the guys pulled close in their 27' albin vega sloop, a pod of dolphins came to play. They put on quite the show! They would dive under the boats, hop in the air, twirl, and converge as the rode down the face of a wave.
Riley, a skipper who lives on a Dreadnought 32 when he's not playing "deadliest catch" up in Alaska hopped across from one boat to ours. He took over. Normally my pride would have been injured, but it was the first time on a new boat in a new harbor in a new ocean. I was a little reluctant to hand over the helm, but at the same time willing to learn. We put up the mainsail to balance out the rig and allow us to tack. We were able to head back in all the way up the long channel and tie up at an end dock safely. Riley went through at least 4 beers completing this maneuver. We then "hip-tied" an inflatable dinghy to the side, and motored to a dock. Hopefully we get better at this docking and undocking thing.
