Growing up, Memorial Weekend was all about renting movies! And then watching them and eating popcorn all day on Monday. It was a nice relaxing and fun time with family.
That was until I got married and now have Adventures interested of relaxing weekends.
Since the Haines own a wooden boat, they have always done a big wooden boat race in The Bay. The race averages around 3-4 hours of sailing. The race always ends up a big stress out race with bailing water and getting soak from salt water spray.
The weekend started by: Friday morning (6am) getting a phone call from my in-laws, saying they were in an accident and the van was total. Everyone is fine. But low and behold, they are still headed to the bay area to sail in the race. Nick and I got into Oakland that afternoon after work and we all sailed up to Treasure Island to anchor for the night and sleep on the boat. Oh yeah, there are 7 people to fit on the boat to sleep. It was a ruff night.
Saturday, we get up and headed over to the city front (San Fransisco City Front) to start "practicing" your job for the race. You think that would be easy enough but there's always got to be an over load of stress on the boat. At 12:20pm we start the race, and got cut off so we had to do a donut around the starting line to qualify the start time. In the race we have to round 5 or 6 buoys, and right before the first one, we are already bailing water. ~Just to remind you that wooden boats are always taking on water and has to be pumped out.~ As we were bailing, the thingy that holds the Boom Rope, broke and we had to try and get it attached to the boat again and keep bailing. Needless to say we were all working hard. After we got that under control, we were almost to the 3rd buoy when, ~once again~ their was water to be bailed. But all of sudden the was ALOT of water! like we sprung a big leak! So by the time we finish the race we had no water line on the outside of the boat and the water in the boat was almost to your knee. That evening after everyone left, except Nick, his dad, and I, Nick got in the water to see if he could find the leak. But no luck.
So we decided to stay the weekend and fix the boat. During the night we had to keep waking up every 30 minutes to turn on the pump to drain the water. It was a very long night. It took us 3 hours on Sunday before we figured out how to rig up something to turn on the pump. After that Nick and his dad took turns in the water to find the hole. We found some possible places but the water was cold and it was over cast, so we decided to go home and get wet suits and the other things we would need for the boat. Nick and I got home around 11pm and unloaded the car to re-load the car with the new things.
Monday we left at 5:30am to head back to the Bay Area to fix the boat. Nick, after several hours in the water, found one of the leaks. It was not easy to find, but he did and we fixed it for now. Around 6:30pm on Nick's dad's last dive in the water, he found the other leak. Just like the other leak, it was fixed for now. We were glad to find it so that way we could get the boat to slow down the sinking. We got home around 12:30 or 1 am Tuesday morning with the knowledge of having to go to work on very little sleep.
This weekend was very busy, cold and wet. Nick and I get to go back to the boat on Saturday to pull everything out that was done on Monday and fix it for real and stop the boat from sinking at the rate it is right now.
This is only one of the Haines Adventures. And I'm sure not the last. Until them....