Where WhimSea Takes Us

Posted by Karen A. Brown

The intended destination for this weekend is Cornucopia. We planned to go with Rain or Shine. We arrived at the marina on Friday night, however, to find their slip empty! We could only hope it was because they were already at Corny.

Saturday morning dawned with lots of wind. Since we were reasonably certain that Rain or Shine was in Wisconsin, we left dock and headed over. And what a wild ride we had too. We heard later Bob even pulled out the binoculars and went to the hill to watch us go across.

We were partially reefed and still going pretty well, with the wind off the starboard bow. We had considerable heel – close to 40 degrees more then once, which caused us to turn off the bilge-pump due to the float and how it’s situated. Unfortunately, one of the windows wasn’t entirely dogged down and we had quite a puddle going before we knew it. We hove to and pumped the bilge, dogged the window and got back underway.

Some of the water may also have been from the water we had gushing across the deck. We were crashing through some huge rollers. One of them met WhimSea’s shoulder and sent a bucket-full up in the air, it followed us down the trough of the next wave and landed splash. It was like a water balloon being thrown at us from a very great height.

When we finally reached Corny and located Deb and Dave, Dave said he knew we’d come – there was a small craft advisory, after all! This was WHIMSEA weather!

We enjoyed an excellent night with Deb and Dave, talking with them. It’s amazing that for as close knit a community a marina is, you really get an opportunity to know just a few people – so it was a rare treat and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sunday, the weather was dirty from the start. Rain, rain and more rain. We woke to a slight roll in the boat – because our toe rail was caught on a bolt on the wall. The current comes in and out quite a lot, causing us to rise and fall about every ½ hour. Apparently during one of them, we rose too close to the bolt and were stuck fast. Luckily, help was near and with some folks adding extra weight to the boat as well as loosening the aft line – we got her free.

We left shortly after that – and another downpour, only to find more rain and lightning heading our way. The wind didn’t know what it wanted to do either so we motored back getting soaked through and through to boot.

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