Excellent day for sailing

My brother, two friends and I went out for a sail.

For most of the day it was sunny with winds mostly from the south at about 15 knots. Waves in the 1 -2 foot range.

Prior to departing, we spent about 45 minutes on a few short projects one of which was finishing the wiring to the Autopilot (SIMRAD TP22). Shortly after we got under sail I brought out the Autopilot and we ended up letting it “steer” for most of the 4 hours we were out. I was surprised at how well it worked. Looking at the GPS track for the day illustrated just how well it held our courses.

The weather forecast called for thunderstorms in the evening starting around 8:00 pm in the Waukegan area. About two hours into the sail we noticed clouds building in the west and looking at the weather RADAR (Smartphones are a great thing to have when sailing) we saw a line of heavy storms about 100 miles away, west of Rockford. The Waukegan forecast still said storms wouldn’t hit until 8:00 pm. About half an hour later the clouds continued building and checking the RADAR again we saw that a line of new storms popped up between us and the line of storms out by Rockford. I decided to cut our day of sailing short by about an hour and we headed back in. As it turned out the line of storms that had popped up split and went around us. We only got a couple minutes of very light rain, though we could see lightening to our north and south.

All in all we had a great sail.