The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigator.
– Edmund Gibbon
Category Archives: photos
Beryl’s Winter Perch
In the summer, ship’s cat Beryl spends her time sprawled out on the boat’s sole, taking advantage of close proximity to the year-round cooling of the Pacific waters. This makes a lot of sense because typically summertime Pacific water temperatures are in the 60’s wherever we’ve been and winter temperatures much lower. Water in the 70’s beneath the keel is quite a rare situation aboard Mahdee.
In the winter, Beryl finds the sole a bit cool for her liking and she climbs to higher perches in the boat. The closer to the cabin overhead, the warmer it is of course. We have the old mainsail as a spare stored adjacent the main saloon in an area we call “the storage bed” because it does nothing but store various things for us. In theory, it IS a bed, but… Back to the sail! with all its bronze sail slides attached, weighs over 100 lbs and takes up quite a bit of space as well. We move it rarely since it takes both David and me both to get it to a new location in the boat. The top of the sail sits about 24″ below the overhead and it just so happens that a fan we have hanging high up in the galley behind the solid fuel stove, pushes air across the stovepipe and directly to the area where the spare mainsail resides. This is a prime warm spot.
This year, when it got cooler, Beryl began to hang out near the diesel bulkhead heater — the heater we usually run 24/7 if it’s cold but we’ve decided to not use this year. Instead, we’ve been keeping the solid fuel galley stove stoked with cleaner burning Anthracite from Pennsylvania. It only took her a few days to relocate to a better, warmer perch atop the spare mainsail. There she sits, hours on end, watching all the goings’ on aboard Mahdee.
Swedish Mainsail or Trysail?
We have a photo of Mahdee from a late 1950’s newspaper clipping. In it, she is sailing downwind under staysail, reefed foresail, and Swedish mainsail. In the pic, according to the caption, she is passing near Gloucester, MA and will touch at Newport and make landfall at Hamilton on her way to the West Indies. A Swedish mainsail is different from the regular one in that its seams are vertical and its size is smaller — much like a winter sail or a sail permanently reefed. We wondered about the use on Mahdee of a Swedish mainsail in that picture until we sailed Mahdee for a bit over a year. Then we totally understood. Her fore-and-aft sail balance is such that it’s desired to frequently sail with the mainsail reefed. Only in the typically mild Southern California sailing have we been able to consistently use the mainsail without a double reef in place. Everywhere else, she’s reefed and I’m thinking about a smaller mainsail. A good part of this is because we sail short-handed: just David and me. With only two of us, we’re extremely cautious about getting too much sail area up and having to deal with it if the wind suddenly pipes up. If we take the jib down, as it is in the newspaper photo, we must take the reefed mainsail down as well in order to keep the helm balanced. A small sail set on the mainmast is the solution.
I put it on my list of things to buy for Mahdee: Swedish mainsail or a trysail. Back and forth my thoughts go with whether the choice should be one or the other. Right now, I’m leaning towards the trysail and I just happened to run across this lovely video of the Schooner Adventuress with her trysail in use. A perfect example of a trysail in other-than-storm-use! Now I just wonder where they had it fabricated…
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