Tornseglare comes home!

When we last left off, Tornseglare had been left behind in lovely Skanör, motorless, if not adrift. The hope of course was a quick fix, and a quick sail home.

That did not happen.

Unfortunately, it seems that the motor is perfectly fine, according to our mechanic. It genuinely sounds like he tried, but in the end other than a bit of minor maintenance we are left more at an “eh?” state. I asked him what we should do if it fails again and the response was: buy a new motor. We shall see.

Anyhow, we picked up the motor yesterday, put it on the boat, and then took the bus out there this morning with our trainer and teacher as well as his family and… off we went.

To be honest, the sailing was pretty easy. It was, as ever, fun to go under the bridge, weird wind and all, and then in this case the wind basically died. We had been making 5 knots sailing abeam, and suddenly we dropped to maybe 2 knots while trying to maintain gull wing sails.

This leads me to the first thing I learned: gull wing doesn’t work very well in low wind. We had secured the boom on one side to avoid an unplanned jibe, but the Genoa did not get this message at all.

In the end we sailed a bit with the wind on one side, but even that wasn’t enough and we had to motor for the last 30 minutes.

I guess the motor worked well enough for that stretch.

The other main thing we learned, or perhaps more re-learned, is that you really have to watch your speed coming into berth. Possibly out of concern for idling too low, we came into our slip at a bit too high a speed, failed to get the mooring line on, and then hit the dock. Not too hard, but not ideal.

Anyhow! We are back, our boat communed with spiders, swallows, and a truly terrifying number of jellyfish. Welcome home.