first on-the-water sailing lesson
Thursday turned out to be Saturday. What do I mean by that? The house got cleaned (hooray!) and we got our first on-the-water sailing lesson.
So how'd it go? Other than one boat dinged during an attempted docking, we did reasonably well. Many a tack, a couple jibes, the boat never flipped over, we never ran into anybody out on the lake. And the lesson went for an extra hour or so without us realizing it. I'm taking it as a good sign that we enjoyed it enough that we didn't really notice that the full two hours had gone by!
Are we experts now? Not a chance - the end of the lesson is when we were practicing jibing, the wind was really really weak, and we still managed to struggle with it. The part we struggled with - pulling in the main sheet and then trying to turn, hold the sheet and then let it run loose - I expect will get harder when the wind is stronger. At the same time, some of the other points of saiding seemed like they'd be a bit easier with a little stronger breeze.
One of the nicest parts was actually when the wind had died down a bit so we were slowly cruising along, the sun was fairly low, and the lake was pretty empty - just a very enjoyable, relaxed way to spend an evening.
Who knows what we'll be saying after lesson number two though :)