Tag Archives: Sailing

Sailboats on blue water

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This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Nostalgia.’ See more responses here.

I wasn’t sure I’d have anything for this theme, but this photo does make me somewhat nostalgic for my sailing days. I liked making passages and being out of sight of land, as opposed to sailing in a bay. I enjoyed watchkeeping, navigation, and my world being simplified to boat, water and sky. I saw more in that reduced world than in my usual busy life. Standing night watches, I didn’t just register the dawn. I noticed a glimmer in the east slowly transition to pre-dawn, and then an almost blinding sunrise. The sight of a bird was an event. There were days of no wind when the ocean was glass and it was hard to believe that the nearest solid surface was thousands of feet below.

Now, had I found a photo with a small boat being lashed by waves on a whitecap-riven ocean, my nostalgia would be less pronounced. One trip, I took a photo of the couple I was sailing with. They were on deck, hunched in foul-weather gear, as water sprayed across the deck, looking exactly as that sounds. These moments are inescapable when sailing longer distances. When I was younger, the discomfort was worth the rewards. Now, I don’t look at it the same way. But looking at this photo, it’s easy to imagine how it could be on that perfect trip no one ever experiences.

Also posted in response to Becky’s July Squares challenge theme of ‘Perspective.’ See more responses here.

SSV Makani Olu

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I was on my way to work one morning when I noticed the sailboat in the top image. The array of white sails caught the early morning sun and stood out against the deep blue water. I pulled over, took this photo and headed on in to work.

I saw later that the boat had anchored in Kawaihae harbor, so on my way home I stopped by to check it out. The SSV Makani Olu is a three-masted staysail schooner (SSV stands for Sailing School Vessel), and is used as a training vessel for various programs run by Marimed Foundation. The boat is based at Kaneohe Bay, on the east coast of Oahu.

In the photo to the right, the boat appears to be four-masted, but that’s just because the mast of the boat behind it lined up perfectly.

For more information about SSV Makani Olu and Marimed Foundation, go to marimed.org.

SV Kwai in harbor

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I saw this interesting-looking vessel tied up alongside the wharf at Kawaihae harbor for a week or more in the first half of January. When I searched for information about the boat, I learned that it’s the Sailing Vessel Kwai, a cargo vessel operating between Hawaii and Kiribati and the Cook Islands in the Pacific.

I’m not sure what it was doing in Kawaihae. The boat had been in Honolulu earlier in the month, on completion of its 51st voyage. Their 52nd voyage left Honolulu on January 24. Perhaps they were picking up cargo or doing maintenance in between these dates.

According to the first blog from Voyage 52 (here), the boat returned to the west side of the Big Island to search for a ghost net. A ghost net is a large clump of fishing nets that can be very destructive to ocean life and that will eventually wash up on shore somewhere being equally problematic when it does so. This net was estimated to be 50 feet long and deep by 70 feet wide.

A tracker had been attached to the ghost net so that it could be retrieved by a larger boat but, according to the blog post, when SV Kwai reached the area, only the tracker was found and retrieved. I haven’t heard or seen anything else about the net, so it is either still floating in the ocean or has washed up somewhere.

For more information about Sailing Vessel Kwai, go to svkwai.com. For more information about the ghost net, go here.

Sailboat after sunset

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This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Calm.’ (See more offerings here.)

Seeing the sun going down after work, I headed down to Kawaihae harbor. After the sun dipped below the horizon, the sky turned peachy and I watched this sailboat slipping over the gently rippling water. It struck me as a very calm, relaxing scene.

Sailboat off the coast

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This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Secrets.’ See more responses here.

Here are a couple of secretive glimpses of a sailboat heading north along the Kona coast. I used to sail for a good many years until I sold my last boat, a twelve-foot San Fransisco Bay Pelican. In that boat, I used to putter around the bay for the fun of it, but I also took it on longer journeys. Before that, I used to have a bigger sailboat and also crewed on the boats of others.

While I like bay sailing, what I really enjoyed was sailing somewhere, not just the activity, but the passage making – navigation, nights spent in the open ocean under the stars.

The boat in these photos could do that, though I’m not sure I could anymore – too used to my creature comforts these days.