Going Nowhere…Fast!

Yesterday a friend, Paul, and I went sailing on Buckeye Lake in my little 17 foot-long sailboat. Some boats are made for speed, with deep v-shaped hulls and big motors. Other boats, like my sailboat, are made to move easily through the water with as little propulsive energy needed as possible. But this trade-off involves the reality that these “efficient” watercraft do not do well at high speeds…they are made to go slow. Even so, Paul and I were very intent on trying to get my boat to go at its maximum hull speed (the speed up to which the boat is stable) which, for this particular model, is 5 knots, or 5.8 miles per hour.

Hope As An Anchor For the Soul

Last year, I spent almost two weeks with my son, Jeff, on his sailboat as we traveled down the Intracoastal Waterway. You can read more about our adventures in earlier blog posts here and here. Being a novice to the nautical world I learned a lot about boating and sailing on this trip. Even though the purpose of boating is to move distances over the water, a critical aspect of most trips aboard a vessel is the art of anchoring. I knew very little about anchors except that they were heavy, and I realized weight was only part of the formula.

There definitely is more to the science of anchoring than meets the eye. To achieve the best anchoring results, anchors should be matched to the type of bottom that exists under the boat.

Turning a Curse Into a Blessing

I wrote in an earlier post about a trip I took with my son to deliver his newly purchased sailboat, the Orenda, to his home port of Charleston, South Carolina. You can read about that adventure here. In this post I’d like to go into more detail on one aspect of that story.

We were grounded at an inlet near Beaufort, North Carolina. The tide had gone out, was now coming back in, and Jeff’s boat on which we had stayed awake all night was righting itself after having been heeled on it’s side in the shallow water for several hours. During this tense predicament Jeff and I had prayed together, asking God to protect us and the boat, and petitioning Him to send someone or something to help free us from the sandy bottom which held us in its clutches. At one point as Jeff was revving the engine in an attempt to power off the bottom the boat lurched forward only to become stuck again in another area of shallow water.

In God’s Hands

Recently I had the extreme pleasure of spending almost two weeks aboard my son Jeff’s newly acquired sailboat as he delivered it from it’s previous home port near Oriental, North Carolina to his home marina in Charleston, South Carolina. It was a 300 mile trip filled with excitement and wonder as well as frustration and anxiety. Jeff has lived and boated in an ocean environment for several years, but this excursion was an adventure which added quite a few novel experiences to my repertoire.

Motoring down the Intracoastal Waterway

Even though Jeff and I would have preferred going “off shore” on the ocean to sail to Charleston, several issues prevented our doing so. 

Satisfaction

Recently I shared in a sermon that I’ve developed an unusual habit related to the search for satisfaction and contentment. When I begin to use a new bottle of shampoo in the shower, I look at the bottle and think “What will my life be like when this bottle is empty?” This quirky practice was particularly pertinent to me years ago when I was deeply dissatisfied with my current employment. I was looking for a way out, and the musings about the future helped me to cope, I suppose.