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West Wight Potter Mailing List maintainer
dfarrell@ridgecrest.ca.us
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Great posting on coping with tides. I have a counter-example from my
extremely brief experience with them. Which is...only get involved with
a strong tide going out to sea if you really want to go to sea. For an
old salt taking the clipper to China, great. For a little Potter and a
less-than-adventurous Potterer such as myself, maybe not so great.
We ended up with a great trip (except for not quite enough wind) under
the Golden Gate awhile back by turning the sail-with-the-tide model
around. By bucking a 4 or so knot current going out we had lots of time
to view the scenery, get scared by tankers, etc. since we made only 1
knot actual speed. When we went as far as we wanted, our underpowered
boat was blasted back into the blessed safety of the bay at about 9
knots by the combined force of current and motor. If we had tried it
the other way around we would have got back, since we did have a slight
speed advantage over the tide at that day and hour, but it would have
been worrisome. Scheduling for slack water would have been ideal, but
the timing was off and we did not have the inclination to do the
nighttime sailing required to get there during a period of virtually no
current flow.
Judy had a sad tale a while back about some folks that had some
unwelcome adventures courtesy of less benign tides and bridges in the
bay. Guess you just can't know too much about the tricks of a place
with strong tides (not much of a problem at Tahoe).
-Ron
HMS18 #42 Bluebelle
Silver City, NV
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