I'd love to hear about things that worked and didn't work for everyone. Here's our list:
Highlights
- Beating up the Core Sound with seven or eight watertribe sails in view!
- Beautiful row through the Harlowe Canal.
- Sailing into the finish with the last rays of the sun, cheered on by enthusiastic watertribers.
What worked
- Core Sound 20 - awesome boat
- Aires boat rollers (from Duckworks)
- Auto-release jamcleat for the rudder downhaul (also from Duckworks).
Failures
- Both of our spiderco stainless safety knives failed. The spring lock rusted and popped out.
- Something made a cracking sound in the tiller while getting off the beach. Luckily, the whole assembly survived the challenge.
What we need to improve
- It took us three tries to get off the beach. We almost made it on our first attempt but I forgot to put in the clevis pin into the pintle and the rudder popped out. I had trouble controlling the boat and so we went the wrong way on our second attempt. SOS thought we didn't have enough sail up and I think he was right. It would have given us more power through the waves and increased maneoverability. My real mistake was that I saw a video of SOS leaving the beach last year and I though "ok, I'll just do what he did". Turns out you need to be as good as him to do that.
- Food system. We packed like we do for our typical pleasure cruise. This didn't work so well on the second day with 10 hours of beating up the sound with constant spray over the rail. It was hard to eat our cliff bars, fruits and nuts before they got drenched. Next time we will bring liquid nutrition drinks.
- Shoes. Again, we packed for a cruise. The shoes I wore were too slippery and I almost fell over once. I have foul weather boots, but I think I need something in between - probably some neoprene dinghy racing boots or something like that.
- Sail balance. I'm still learning the CS 20 and think I can probably get another 5 degrees on the wind by learning how to set the proper sail shape and proper centerboard angle.
- Waterproofing electronics. I didn't bring enough dessicant and as a result had a hard time reading my GPS on the second day. This led to a few humorous misunderstandings on our boat.
- Navigation spotlight. I mistakenly bought a dive light for my night navigation spotlight. It turns out that dive lights are too diffuse to act as a good narrow beam spotlight.