Turn the Bow into the Wind...

Today was a busy day. Anita and Tim were going to a funeral this morning, so I took public transportation the entire way to CSIRO. This involved a tram ride to Flinder's Station, a train ride out to Huntingdale, and then a bus ride to Monash University. All in all, the trip took around 1hr 15 minutes. It was a little long, but I had very little wait time between legs of the journey. The public transportation system here is pretty good in that sense.

I was the first to arrive at the office and spent quite a bit of time digging around trying to find the light switches for the office. I looked everywhere and just could not find them. Finally, I just decided to give up and work in the dark. Fortunately, Matt came in shortly thereafter and showed me where the switches are. It turns out that the architects chose to hide them around the corner and down a hallway. Not exactly straight forward.

I had lunch with Aaron and Michele. It was good to meet Aaron, I hadn't met him when he was in Austin back in July, 2008 (after ICOM) because I was home for Skippy and Sarah's wedding. In any case, he is doing his postdoc with Anita here at CSIRO and he is also organizing a conference in Wollongong (I will be presenting there).

Anita and I left work early to go sailing in the harbour. Richard and his wife Jill came to pick us up at CSIRO and we drove the the Royal Brighton Yacht Club. There we met up with Dr. Brian Cherry and his wife Miriam (the owners of the yacht). We were at the yacht club to take part in the Wednesday pursuit race. Brian and Miriam's yacht was pretty impressive. Though I don't know exactly how long it was, it displaces 11 tons and had quite an extensive below deck configuration. I worked with Anita and the rest of the crew getting the yacht ready to race and finally we pushed off to get underway before the race.

I knew essentially nothing about sailing before today. I found out that you have to learn quickly, especially if you are racing with a crew that wants to win! We took the yacht out of the marina under engine power and then turned the bow into the wind to raise the main sail. This, it turns out, was not a trivial operation. The sail has to go up correctly and it can take some iteration (up/down) to finally raise the sail. I was standing out on the bow forward of the main mast trying to help keep the ropes straight while also trying not to fall off. (the photo was taken while we were in the marina before we got underway)

Once we did this, we could turn the engine off and get underway using wind power. The wind was particularly strong today and, as such, the waves were pretty impressive. We were navigating through 4 to 5 foot high waves. As such, the yacht was pitching and listing wildly. In some cases, it took almost all the effort I had to not get thrown off the boat. As we would go over waves, the boat would dive down and the next wave would crash over the bow, spraying us with water. I hadn't really expected the ride to be quite this rough...

Finally, we extended our forward sail and ran a few tacking drills before we were ready to get under way. Our handicap was 4 minutes and Brian and Miriam did a good job of getting us to the start line almost on the dot. The race was a (relatively) short loop. The wind was strong, so this made the process of tacking much more demanding. It took me a while to figure out how to position myself such as to not fall off the yacht or get hit in the head with the boom as we were tacking.

I found the experience to be quite fun! Although I felt like I didn't know what I was doing half the time. I suppose I'll learn if we do this a few more times. Our boat took 3rd place in the race and we had a close finish beating out another yacht - that was pretty fun to see how that played out. After the race, we took the boat back into the marina and shut everything down for the night.

We had dinner at the club (along with many of the other crews that we had just raced against). The dinner was really good and it was very nice of Anita to pay for the meals for all of us and it was nice of Brian to pay for the wine! I had a great time talking with Anita, Miriam, and Malcolm (a former CSIRO scientist who joined us for the race as well).

After dinner, Anita and I took trains back to our respective homes. I got back to the Graduate House and took a shower (to wash off all the salt) before getting ready for bed.