The days slip on by here in Utila, and that’s just fine. The anchorage makes for a pretty nice office for me in the mornings, and the afternoons are spent on/in the water, or on the beach.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t rigged this thing up quite right—still—but it doesn’t seem to matter much. As long as there are a few knots blowing it zips along pretty good. The kids are really getting good at sailing, though only Ouest has the strength to keep the mainsheet held tight. There must be a better way to rig this than to have to hold the full force of the sail in your hand.
Doesn’t seem to matter where we are, there is always a dog who is happy for our company.
Toys. Both the plastic and the natural varieties.
Don’t forget to wash your… oh, forget it.
Not sure how the biggest person gets stuck with the weakest chair.
About half an hour before we left the beach bar we saw a couple of dolphins swim by. When we got back home we found the bay in a state of mayhem. Dive boats were zipping all over the place. Swimmers were everywhere. Pangas were running full speed in every direction. And right behind our boat we watched five dolphin fins surface. The entire tourist population of the small island was going nuts over the possibility of a selfie with a dolphin in the background. One boat nearly ran the dolphins over and then high-fived all around with the tourists on the boat who got blurry pictures of the fins from five feet away. Frankly, the whole scene was pretty disgusting, and really a stain on our impression of the dive industry here. I can’t even imagine how they act when a whale shark is spotted. We had considered ponying up the $50 bucks/head to go in search of the whale sharks with them, but this scene made it a definite no for us. We didn’t want to be a part of that sort of harassment.
7 Comments on “Utila Days”
Time to introduce more pulleys….
I dove with the Utila Aggressor in 2007, didn’t see anything big. Still, very nice diving! No sharks were sighted….
Reminds me of Laura Dekker who circumnavigated the globe at age 16. She donated her sailboat Guppy and it was reefed and destroyed last August. She started sailing very young in Holland.
Hallo Pat,
Yep, Google “how to rig an Optimist”. There are plenty of movies on the subject, some better than others.
You guys have the mainsheet all wrong. It must run straight up and down in three parts between mid boom and the cockpit floor. There will be an attachment point on the cockpit floor for the block. The fittings up front on the boom is for the vang.
Once the boat is correctly rigged a 7 year old will handle it in easily in upto moderate wind. The kids will also enjoy the sailing more once the boat is well set up.
Also get them to move away from the transom. Move forwards until you are sitting against the mid- bulkhead. Dragging the stern slows the boat to a crawl and makes it sluggish.
Have fun!
Our optimist had a block with a loop on it attached to the boom and a double block on the floor.
Rope was attached to boom pulley loop, down through upper pulley on floor, back up to boom pulley then back down through lower pulley on floor. So the rope doubled back on itself a couple times. You’d hold the sheet as it came out of the floor pulley. With all that leverage, was easy.
I seem to remember that we changed the bottom block for a ratchet pulley to make it even easier, but that was a PIA because we couldn’t ease the sheet in gusts easily. Maybe we were too small to figure out how to release the ratchet properly.
From what I overheard hear between sailing mom’s (Auckland) the vang needs to be pulled down real tight.
Michael Storer, on his facebook page for sailing Ozgooses has a condensed set of instructions for optimising speed in a dinghy which is quite interesting.
Hi guys, Been following and enjoying your travels for years. I’m not at all a safety Nazi, but the kids need PFDs if they’re off by themselves. We sail a lot and I’ve got a Dyer midget for my two. Great fun, great experience, but picture an accidental jibe and a knock on the head and… Just a suggestion.
I showed our daughter… She teaches sailing to optis, 420, sails in college and sailed in them for years when she was little…. She suggested you Google a picture of one rigged. They need a block and tackle at the bottom. And a bunch of other minor changes….here are her answers..
1. Not enough sprit tension
2. Missing sail ties
3. Sail ties at the head and tack are wrong
4. The main sheet is all sorts of wrong
5. Kids are sitting in the wrong spot
6.It’s missing a block and the purchase system
And a bow Line…
Ok, she’s an engineering student…
Anyways it Looks like fun…
Our youngest (8) is sailing these again this summer at the yacht club… It’s big up here in the north east ( actually all over the place).. You have no idea until you go to the Nationals and see 250 kids all 8,9,10 years old suited up in the most exclusive sailing gear…each with their own Opti… Sailing out under the Newport Bridge in the shipping lane…You have heard the term soccer moms.. Well the proper term in this sport is opti mom….
If it were me, I would just rig it so it works but all wrong… and leave them the printout of the proper way and then let the kids figure it out…they will be much better off if they accomplish it themselves in terms of setting it up right… You know…papa it doesn’t go like that.. This line goes here, you need to tie it this way…. Sailing lessons at the yacht club…. The kids have to do all this themselves…
Have fun, it sure looks like it.
Walt
Thanks for the detailed comment, Walt. Please thank your daughter as well. We will be looking for a sailing class this off season at the marina. Appreciate it.
go get’m tiger(s)…once again wonderful imagery!