Fitting place for this post....

Learning to sail!

My wife and I finally got to sail out new to us Macgregor 25.

We had it out once before, but didn't sail. It took us an hour to motor out to a depth that was sailing friendly, we are on FL nature coast. The time we had allotted to us meant it was time to turn around and motor in.

Ok, so yesterday we get out again. We sailed for close to 6 hours! We had a great time. We did a lot of experimenting with sail trim. We could definitely feel different trims affecting performance.

A question now. We had difficulty sailing into the wind. I would guess that 30 degrees either side was as close as we could get. It seemed to me that 60 degrees total was kind of lousy. Is this likely a sail trim problem or boat design issue? Perhaps combination of both?

Finally, after motoring out for an hour, we idled down the outboard. It idled for 15 seconds, then shut off. It would not restart. (I am a mechanic, so not asking for troubleshooting advice). We did our sailing, then sailed back in the shallow (less than 5 ft at some points) and narrow (about 60 feet for most of it) channel, and docked under sail power. We were somewhat proud of ourselves!

At any rate, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and are looking forward to when we have time to go again.