where have I been the past 4 1/2 months, and what the hell have I been doing?

Well obviously I haven’t been blogging, so I’ll try to catch up. My last post introduced Chinook, our MacGregor Venture 25′ sloop. We kept her on Utah Lake until mid October going out as often as we could and enjoying every minute of it. The season on Utah Lake ends around the end of October, and my plan was to bring her home to do some puttsing for a few weeks (or months) before trying her out on The Great Salt Lake. Apparently GSL has some great winter sailing (so I’ve been told). I knew of a few things I wanted to work on, including replacing the cable for the swing keel. I had been warned that an old cable could easily fail, which could lead to the keel being stuck in the down position, or worse yet, severe damage to the hull if the keel were to swing down uncontrolled. “I’ll replace it as soon as take her out of the water”. Seems those are famous last words for a boat owner.
Mid October rolled around and there was a storm expected later in the week so Alex and I went to the lake after school one day to pull Chinook out of the lake and bring her home. “It such a beautiful day, and the wind is great, lets take her out for a quick sail before putting her on the trailer.” Apparently those are some more famous last words. The actual words I used that afternoon were much more colorful than those listed above, but nothing my 8 year hadn’t heard me say before.
Sure enough, before we could even get all of the way out of the marina, the keel cable broke, the keel swung from full height and ripped 2″ long holes in the hull on each side of the keel trunk.
Needless to say, Chinook hasn’t seen the Great Salt Lake yet, but hopefully she will in the spring.

Coming soon: “What the hell was that noise and why is there so much water coming out of that water jug?” details of our last adventure of the season on Utah Lake and how we got Chinook home.

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