The Weather makes the schedule

[Alan Wheeler]

Or something similar to that. We have all heard the lesson. If you haven't, it's a good lesson to keep in the back of your mind. Whenever I am forced to meet a schedule, I end up getting bad weather. This last weekend trip was no different. We had to get around the "top" of a piece of our country that can be yet another challenging sailing area in the right, or should I say wrong conditions. We had a nasty weather front approaching and wa trying very hard to beat it, or we would be stuck inplace longer than our work commitments can allow. The Airforce don't take kindly to the idea of my wife being AWOL:-) So we made a run for it. We had 33kts on our tails most of the way. The cape we had to round can be plain nasty and scary and I was prepared to trun back to a bay if we could round it right then. But the wind was a direction that was unusual for here. As we came through the passage, the sea was actually quite OK. About 1.5m swells. But as we enterd the bay on the other side, the wind kept rising and the sea kept building. We got to a point of no return where wh figured, to hck with it, we are most of the way across. But the sea kept building, which was strange as we were getting closer to land. The winds were droping off the high bluffs and we had a constant reading of 30kts and good long blows to 40kts. The Sea's were just plain nasty and steep. At full power, I was making headway of only 1.9kts at one point. A trip that would normaly take us 2hrs across, took 3hrs and felt much longer. We got in OK and moored in a bay that should have given us good shelter. It was flat, but the wind howled and buffeted us all night. Most unusual for this bay.
So, when ever you go sailing, the rule is, the Weather dictates your schedule......unless you have no choice, in which you may wish you did.