A wild end to the season. Since Mark wanted to sail with us, we scheduled the trip to Gore Bay for today, Sunday. The long-range forecast seemed okay. But when we left the dock at 10:30 conditions were kinda bad and getting worse.

On the way out of Mudge Bay, while we were reefing the main, the snap shackle holding the main sheet to the traveler broke, letting the boom swing free. That was not good. So we dropped the sail and scrounged a replacement shackle. Once that was fixed we went to re-raise the reefed main only to have the halyard shackle come free of the headboard and swing around the backstay. That of course required turning around and heading down wind, digging out the boathook, and then performing some aerobatic snagging-type gyrations.

The idea of turning back flashed by all of us at that point—but with the main finally sheeted in hard and a scrap of jib rolled out, we carried on, beating into gusts of gale force wind, and ever increasing seas.

By pinching up in the gusts we were able to keep windward enough to make the green turning buoy at the start of the Clapperton channel. At that point is was: roll in the jib, drop the main, hoist the mizzen, turn down wind, roll out a slightly bigger scrap of jib—and then…take off!

Seven and a half knots occasionally, and once out in the big water, seas of perhaps 5 feet, on the quarter, with Heliotrope doing some steep rolling. Mark tossed a ginger cookie, but otherwise we were all fine, except for the cold. We were shivering and shaking by the time Gore Bay hove into view, where John and Mary Ellen came to pick us up in car with a heater.

Once back in Kagawong, at the marina, as we were picking up our car, The Geisers pulled up, and all of us, of course, started talking about the crazy weather. That’s when George said, “And if you can believe it, this morning we saw some idiots out in the bay in a sailboat.”

Wonder who that could have been.

And, finally.