Our opportunities for sailing are becoming rare as the season winds down. My son is on the high school soccer team, which usually takes away our Saturdays, and he's on the the high school trap shooting team (and I'm a coach), which takes away our Sunday mornings. We managed to get out for a beautiful afternoon sail yesterday though, and had a fun time.
Winds were 12 to 15 kts, gusting to 20+ kts at times and because our lake is surrounded by tall bluffs with many coulees funneling the wind, the wind is always changing so you always have to pay attention, particularly as you get closer to land. Wanting a casual sail, we double reefed the main and unfurled the jib to match.
The excitement came when I heard the buzzing of a plane and turned to see it flying in front of us, low above the river...much lower than any other aircraft I've seen over the water. It flew down river, got to the end of the lake, pulled up and banked left. I called for my wife to come up and check it out. It flew back up river, banked left again, and this time few behind us even lower.
I didn't see any pontoons on it, like the smaller float planes we'd use for getting to our fishing camps in Canada, so I wondered if perhaps it was in distress. It kept coming down and sure enough, landed on the lake. I thought about dropping the sails and motoring over to see if we could render assistance, but there were many sailboats closer than I was so I held tight and just watched. It wasn't sinking and there was no smoke, so my concern started easing and were now just curious so we continued to watch. So there was what I thought was a lot of smoke, but it must have been water spray from the prop wash. Soon the plane started moving again and flew back up into the air, banked back around and headed back northwest again, from where it came.
I have no idea what the point of that landing was, but it made for some excitement. It didn't have any markings on it other than the tail number, which I didn't catch. My wife took some video of it as it passed us just before it landed.
That just might be the last sail of the season. We're planning on sailing Sunday again but with a forecast of 40's or 50's and rain, the only place we'll be going is to the pump-out dock to get the tank pumped out before I replace the holding tank in a couple of weeks.
