Over the weekend we had planned on joining about five other local sailboats to head down the lake and spend the night out. We had been planning this for about two months to try to spark up interest again in sailing here in Havasu on a lake that has become overrun by high powered speedboats. I prayed and prayed and prayed that there would be wind for the weekend. I think I prayed too hard! Saturday was great, however the forecast for Sat night was for winds to be 25 to 35, gusting to 50, with gusts to 60 in narrow channels. Yikes. I pulled out the "wuss" card and we scrubbed the anchoring out portion of the trip. Most everyone sailed on Saturday then packed up and went home. Gary O. from Phoenix had come over and brought my friend Scott with him as crew. They spent the night at our house. On Sun morning we awoke to pretty stiff breezes, but not as bad as the forecast. I thought that if I could con these two guys (both seasoned sailors) to head out with me, it would be a perfect time to see how Dauntless would handle a really good blow. So off we went. Was it blowing? Oh yeah. Occasionally, I would pull out the handheld wind meter and got just about 30 knot readings, and there were times that we were too busy to pull out the meter that it blew harder. It started out as a train wreck. We hoisted the main with the first reef already tied in. Then, I hoisted the storm jib........upside down. Nice. I've never done that before and what a great time to start! I headed forward to deal with getting it down and flipping it over. That's when I heard Gary say "reef's out!". I thought the rope was off the cleat but no.....the reef block had been torn from the boom. Honestly, the reefing hardware was ridiculously undersized, I knew it and had not done anything about it. It didn't really matter anyway, because it was already obvious that we needed the second reef tucked in, which is what we did. And, we tied in a safety line to keep the second reef's hardware from letting go. Somewhere along the process, a batten pocket velcro opened up and the batten took another path than we did! hahaha. OK ...Take a deep breath! The main is double reefed, the storm jib is right-side up and drawing nicely...hey! we are actually sailing in this stuff. We took the boat around to the North side of the lake where the fetch allows some pretty impressive swells to build (for a lake). Sometimes as big as 4' but mostly 3 footers. Opposite of what I expected, going to windward was fairly easy but turning around and reaching was a ton of work for the person on the helm. The swells would try to yaw the boat as they hit the rear quarter. It was controllable but a heck of a workout. I should have tried raising the swing keel, but I didn't as we did not have a long way to go. I think that would have calmed down the tendency for the bow to round up when the rear quarter got hit with the larger breaking swells. Right at the end of the trip when we were getting ready to drop sail it(the wind) cranked up even more. I'm not sure of the wind-speed but there was spray beginning to come off the top of the swells as they broke. We sailed back to the marina with no problems. With some good teamwork we got the sails down without any damage and fired up the 9.9 yammerhammer. I was fortunate that when I bought the boat it had a 9.9 Hi-torque electric start 4 stroker on it. It worked great and has more than enough power to handle the boat effectively in that wind. Like Mark said a few weeks back about his high wind trip on "Faith", we always felt safe on the boat. She handled the conditions well. The failure of the reef gear was caused by undersize gear installed by the previous owner and not corrected by me. A good lesson for me to remember..Install good gear if you intend to seriously sail your boat. You never know when it might save your but! Oh yeah,.....also.....it's really embarrassing to hoist the storm jib that you never use upside down! Take a look at it when things are calm and walk through setting it up, lead placement, etc. etc.! Thanks to Gary and Scott. With both of them and myself on the boat it was pretty easy getting things done as they as both very accomplished sailors. It was a blast. You can see some short video(no sound and crummy quality) clips at my site _www.havasumontgomerys.piczo.com_ (http://www.havasumontgomerys.piczo.com) I took it with my still camera that allows quick low res video clips. (the sailing looks even easier than it was in the video, but believe me it was rockin'!) Sean
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