Gale Force Sailing is proud to report that this past weekend we provided a team building program for the new KIPP school in New Orleans, the Central City Academy.
KIPP Central City Academy is a college preparatory public middle school that will change the lives of its students and the city of New Orleans. They are scheduled to open their doors in the fall of 2007 , enrolling 90 fifth graders. Each year they will add a new class of fifth graders, eventually serving 360 students in fifth through eighth grade.
With this daunting task in mind Gale Force Sailing developed a team building program for the entire teaching and administrative staff in order to help them develop a bond that will provide the foundation for success in the coming weeks and months.
So if you haven’t seen her…here she is. Spartina! Spartina! We love you!
At times we could sail, and it was wild to race through the fog, the sails drawing, the gurgle of the water around the hull, and the occasional fog horn or buoy gong. We sailed the Eggamogon Reach, and never saw more than 100 yards from the boat. Now I can say I’ve cruised Maine, but I’ll need a postcard to see what it looks like.
and navigating our course. In between, we had some fun.
Owl may have gotten to Halifax first, and a few other boats may have already finished, but we were the first to stuff our bellies with steamers, lobster, local beer and Maine’s finest hospitality. In the end, I think we did better than most.
First light. This is about 0430.
Safe and sound with smiles all around.
Pretty gnarly in fact. The winds were on the nose, in other words coming directly from where we wanted to go, and blowing about 20kts. While the boat was capable of sailing in those conditions we were quite slow, and the heel of the boat made the experience quite exhausting. We were sailing under a reefed main, doused mizen, and partially furled (reefed) jib. Speed through the water was about 6kts, but given our angle to Brazil Rock we were only making about 4kts of progress. We were intermittently in sight of several other boats, and looking now that the race tracker, I think we were in it. Had the wind shifted left (North) we probably would have been VERY advantaged. The boats to our South were in a favorable location if the long predicted but never seen S/SW breeze filled. Looking at the buoy report from the area near Brazil Rock - they are still beating in nasty seas.
After we made the decision to turn back, we shifted the boat’s mode into a slower, more comfortable pace. While sailing a beam reach towards Maine we continued under a reefed main, and reefed jib. Larry and I, watch mates, sailed through a series of rainy squalls. One of which had the most amazing lightening. The storm licked the waters around us with blinding bolts of lightening, and the rain came on heavy, but we suffered little as the auto-pilot drove and we huddled under the dodger. Our biggest concern was making the coast before daylight, so we did almost all we could to slow the boat down so that we could raise our harbor in the light. Heavy fogged prevailed, but with the help of GPS, all manner of bells and gongs we slipped into the Hinckley facility in SouthWest Harbour, ME.
Here is the site to track our race 
