Fender Dragging Redux

After a few days practising solo in Picos and Lasers, last Sunday was the "day sail", an opportunity to take out some slightly bigger (two or three person) boats and go further afield. Ian signed us up for a Dart-16 catamaran. Neither of us had ever sailed such a thing before (obviously, in my case; Ian has a bit more sailing experience); nor had we sailed together. I was apprehensive about this -- especially since Ian's stated reason for his choice was "it goes really fast!" -- but it turned out to be the perfect boat. How could I argue with something that has a trampoline in the middle and a trapeze on either side?

It was a comfortable ride, far more so than the hard little dinghies of previous days (my legs were, by this point, a mess of scrapes and bruises), and -- on account of going "really fast" -- was the only boat in the group to make it to our destination under wind power, sneaking the whole journey on the back of a breeze that died in our wake, leaving our companions miles behind to be eventually towed to mooring by the rescue boat.

A fine lunch followed -- the little island we'd sailed to is occupied by a restaurant and nothing else -- then some snorkelling and general hanging around in the hope that the wind might get up a bit.

It didn't.

When it was time to go, the sea was like a fucking millpond, and it was clear we'd have to be towed home. Which seemed ignominious, but turned out to be rather pleasant in its own right, and was livened up considerably by instructor Ben's suggestion that we try some "fender dragging" en route -- basically, getting pulled along in the water rather than in the boat. Everyone was pretty doubtful about this at first, but we figured, eh, might as well give it a go.

It felt a bit silly, hanging onto a rope off the back of the Dart -- until the tow started, at which point it became fantastically silly. Better still was clinging to the underside of the catamaran (there are handy lines attached at the front and beneath the trampoline) as it surged forward through the churning, salty waters, cackling hysterically at the sheer ridiculousness of it, even while straining shoulders and handgrips or -- in my later experiments -- abrading backs of knees and tops of feet in increasingly circus-inspired poses (hooking toes up over the front bar and lying back in the water with arms spread wide).

We didn't go the whole way back that way, of course -- half a dozen people in the water slow things down a lot -- but we did spend a good amount of time being dragged through the surf, and it was great.
Posted by matt at September 3, 2005 10:28 PM