Some times things do come in threes

[killarney_sailor]

I spent a couple of weeks cruising with a friend on his well-maintained Moody 346 (a terrific boat, in particular if you are less than 5'9" or so). Winds were quite contrary and we did not have that many good sailing days but overall had a great time catching up with each other since I have been away from the area for some time.

Anyway ... on our last day, in fact within about six miles of the barn when we motoring directly into the wind to get back, things started to happen.
1) Gary had noticed a noise somewhere in the drive train that he diagnosed (rightly I think) as a deteriorating cutless bearing. It had slowly gotten worse over the days but all of sudden there was a large thud and lots of vibration at any speed above 1400 rpm.
2) OK, we will just hoist our sails and beat back to the yacht club and use the engine for docking (at slow speed). We go hard on the wind and BBQ decides to fall off. Gary, being well organized, has the Force 10 attached to the boat with an extra piece of light rigging wire, so we only lose the grill and the plate over the burner - memo to me, good idea to but some sort of tie around the unit too.
3) We get the grill mounted again and are having a great old sail and are just ready to tack toward the harbor entrance and the dark clouds ahead get nasty in a hurry and we are in the middle of a good old Lake Ontario summer squall (forecast was "chance of a shower, risk of a thunderstorm" - that is, the forecast you get about 80% of the time. Nothing spectacular about the squall - around 40 knots for 20 minutes or so but a bit of damage to the jib (some tabling came off as we hove too). By the time we got to the dock 15 minutes later it was bright sun with no more than 5 knots of wind.

The joys of Lake Ontario cruising, a fairly boring trip (other than the company, my wife and a good friend) with too much motoring with about an hour of unneeded excitement.