Gentlemen... your most embarassing sailing moment if you please.

[tomaz_423]

David, how on earth did you find a second elan 45 in English harbour. This is not a common boat on that side of the ocean.
Or were you two so wasted that you did not notice it was a different brand?

[Livinondreams]

Me and my friends were following some girls we just met. Wow, did I look like a fool but in my defense, it didn't have a buoy marking it, but I was in to shallow of water.

It wasn't sailing, but it was boating

[Davidrogerson]

No definately an Elan, or maybe a Swan???

[merttan]

I drove an hour to the boat carried everything (beers, meats, veggies, ice, etc..) aboard then got my launch check up done... Ready to move out...
Yeah someone forgot the outboard keys back in the house...
And we learned how to hotwire a boat that day....

[JiffyLube]

One beautiful sunny day my wife and I, along with two Power Squardon members, took our boat out for an afternoon of sailing. We backed out of our slip, but the shifter in forward, and away we went. When we dedcided to come back in for the day, I slowed the boat down to 2 to 3 knots as I was going down the fairway to our slip. Just before I was ready to make the turn into our slip, I shifted the transmission into reverse (no power) to slow down for the approach. Just as I started to make the turn into the slip, I noticed that the boat was not slowing down. As we were coming into the slip I decided I better give some power to reverse, so I gave the engine two short burst of power. Instead of slowing down, the boat was speeding up! My wife was able to get onto the finger with a dock line while I realized that we were going to fast (but not knowing why), then I heard her yell out "TWO FAST!!!" At the precise moment she yelled that, the boat crashed into the slip, and we were all scrambling around trying to control the boat. I was trying to stay composed, but I was as embassed as hell, because I knew the two Power Squardron members with us were going to tell everyone we knew. After they left our boat, I started poking around the boat trying to figure out what went wrong. What I discovered was the transmission cable broke! It had to of broken when we reversed out the slip at the beginning of the day, and since we never needed reverse all day, we had no idea that the cable was broke. While I tried to tell the PS members that were with us that day about the mechanical error (not human error), it was to late as they had passed the story of the crash on to everyone we knew. I received the Bilge Water award from the PS for that event, but it was all in fun.

[sailhagg]

Samething happened to me only I lost both forward and reverse. The cable didn't break it just slipped off the connection. Of course this was the day we decided to try out the most wind we've seen since having this boat. I love being part of the circus! I did get it back together and off we went for some great sailing!

[JiffyLube]

Originally Posted by sailhagg

Samething happened to me only I lost both forward and reverse. The cable didn't break it just slipped off the connection. Of course this was the day we decided to try out the most wind we've seen since having this boat. I love being part of the circus! I did get it back together and off we went for some great sailing!

Had I known that we lost reverse, I could have assigned someone to move the transmission shifter by hand. Then I could have yelled down below "Engine room!...Reverse!"

[GilStump]

so far? Two things. (I am a newbie and it shows!)

#1. I wanted to remove our 150 Genoa so we could put on our fancy new canvas (poorly measured and made by a dude I should but won't mention) Wull I ain't never removed one of them thangs afore. I released everything and started to unfurl the sail, then asked my wife to hold the sheets and kwapapafoof i grabbed her just as the wind whisked heran sail away. It was like one of those youtube extreme sailing videos and we were still tied to the dock!

#2. Boy am I a dummy. After removing that headsail the halyard was thwapawhacking all night long. At 3:00am I had had enough and went out and said, I'll just raise the #$%^&* thing to the top and that'll stop it from thwapawhacking in my sleepy time.... I literally said "Doh!" when it was halfway up there. Looks like I'm buying a bosun's chair next week...

I'm sure I'll have plenty more!

[wduncan50]

My wife and I were racing our 16'9" O'Day Daysailer on a lake in Texas, must of been around November and cold. The wind was around 20 and as we were just "for fun" racers we decided to call it a day early. We headed up to the floating dock trying to come up from downwind (did I mention the boat had no motor?). As we were making our approach a bass boat fishing the dock decided to pull forward into the place I was headed for. I steered to starboard to dock at the place he had just left when he reverses back into this place. Now I had no chose but to come about and try again. As I was making a loop my center board decided to come up, a problem I fixed before our next outing. My wife was standing on the bow with the painter in hand when I realized we were being blown into a downwind dock and the boat would not respond. I noticed the centerboard and quickly put it back down, but it was too late we were hard on the downwind dock. My wife was trying to fend us off when the centerboard took effect and I was able to tack off of the dock, the problem was that my wife was on the wrong side of the Jib and in the water she went. She was instantly nearly frozen by water around 40 - 45 degrees. She was trying to climb up the dock, not an easy thing in warm weather and asked a fisherman there to help her. He said just a minute and reeled in his fishing line first, quite the gentleman huh? I finally got to the windward dock and docked, this is when I noticed the 2 foot rip we had put in the Jib. As you can imagine this was our last race in cold weather.

[JiffyLube]

Originally Posted by wduncan50

He said just a minute and reeled in his fishing line first, quite the gentleman huh?

Priorities first...lol