Sailing Stories

Transport to Erie Dover 2012

We had to bring the boat from Dunkirk to Erie. We left with the boat full of supplies and food for the week. While we were leaving the wind was blowing about seven knots. We cast off the dock lines off and left the harbor. Once out of the harbor we turned towards Erie and set the sails, we ended up going about six knots. The sail was going fine until an hour and a half into the sail, my dad and I heard a "POP!". He knew exactly what the noise was, so he told me to release the sheets of the sails while he starts up onto the fore-deck to take the genoa down. Once the sheets were released I started releasing the halyard as he was making sure the sail didn't fall into the water. Then next came taking down the main then flaking the sail onto the boom. The object that broke was the lower shroud, shrouds hold the mast up if we did not react with taking the sails down as quickly as we did we could have lost the mast. We turned around back to Dunkirk because we couldn't race with a broken boat. We got back to the marina and some guys from Buffalo that were heading down to Erie and were there, they tried to help but we did not get anywhere. So we went home for the night, my dad spent the night worrying about the boat and contemplating what to do next. Overnight he came to the conclusion that we should head to Erie so we can fix the boat as we go from place to place. We would already be with the fleet when the boat got fixed so we could do as much racing as possible. So when we got to the Erie Yacht Club there were not very many slips open so we ended up rafting off of another boat. The skipper's meeting in about five minutes or so, so we headed down to the club for meeting for all the info we might need for docking at the other clubs and about the races in preparation of once we got the boat fixed. After the skipper's meeting we had a good diner at the club that was delicious we had chicken fingers that night. We were at the club for the majority of the party with live music and everything. I headed back to the boat before my dad, so I was alone in the dark headed to the boat. When I got to the dock that our boat was on I forgot that there was a space between the dock and the parking lot. My foot went between the dock and the parking lot while my other leg went in front of me with my knee bent so that I wouldn't go all the way through to the water. My knee hit that concrete dock so hard you could almost hear an echo of the hit. I also got brush burns and really bad scrapes. I was in so much pain that I crawled over the boat we were rafted off of and onto our boat. When I got onto our boat the first thing I did was turn on the lights and get the first aid kit out, it turns out my leg was bleeding really badly. When my dad got to the boat and I told him that I was injured he said he would wrap it up but I already did it. Then I went to bed in the quarter birth of the boat with some pain from my leg.