first group gets to beach

Article By Shorty

The reach past the first peninsula was an easy one for me to leave them in my wake. At the first peninsula I came too close to shore and grounded my centerboard, came to a stop so quickly that I was almost tossed over the bow. Pulled my board up and got back underway. But then as we made the turn around Oliver Point, the wind shifted a little and it became more of a beat to windward. Hugh's Hunt was pointing a little higher than the Sparrow and passed it, was coming up on me and looking like I was going to be overtaken. Just in the nick of time we arrived at the landing area and I charged straight for the beach. One nice thing about my boat is that I put an extra layer of fiberglass on the bottom so whenever it is time to land, I just head for the beach and charge at it.



Hugh & Tom, and Bill rafted together, both of them have shoal keels so they stayed out in the water a bit. The water is only up to my butt there, easy to wade ashore. They could have come in closer because it was low tide as we arrived, wasn't going to get any shallower than it was.



On the chart it looks sort of like there is a cove that we could sail into. The water was only about a foot deep there and isn't really a cove, it is more like a marsh.



There were hermit crabs all along the beach, just dozens of them. I picked up a few shown here, put them all in a row to see which one had guts enough to move first. Hugh was telling me a trick to get them out of the shell. If you can get a string around one leg, then suspend that string in the air and the crab will get tired and let go of the shell leaving him outside it. Isn't supposed to hurt them, just a neat way to see the whole crab.



We had been at the beach for a few hours and were wondering what happened to the rest of the group. Here is Tom with a humongous set of binoculars scanning the horizon for them. First into view was Wayne with his easy to spot blue hull, and then John was spotted with his yellow sail, but Louis's potter 15 with it's white hull and sail was thoughest of all to see.



Hugh is sitting back enjoying the experience. This is his first boat and only his 4th time out sailing.



Bill hasn't rigged a bimini top for his sparrow yet, so he tossed up this piece of polytarp and tried numerous configurations with little bits of string and various poles from an oar to a stick with a nail which he claimed was actually a whisker pole.



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