Fwa!

After three months of preparation the 14-foot Laser 2 made its first splashes into the colorful waters of Willoughby Bay. Conditions were a little too much for a first voyage in an unfamiliar and untested boat with a totally-green-never-been-sailing Spanish crew with no maritime vocabulary whatsoever but that didn’t stop us. We had worked hard and waited so long for the day that winds of 15-18 knots and big Atlantic swells out by the reef were no deterrent.

With only a few awkward moments, we found ourselves power reaching. The boat really moves! We were skittering down the face of waves with the dagger board half way up and spray flying, both of us hiking out, everything vibrating and humming. With the self-bailer sucking water like a wetvac and us hooting and a hollering, we sailed the mile and a half across the bay in just moments, tacked and were back in less! We had such huge speed grins on our faces that our jaw muscles actually cramped up!

It took a while to assemble all the missing pieces of the boat. I found several parts when I went home in December. Antigua Rigging made up the essential diamond wires I was missing and a wire jib halyard. I made a tiller out of a scrap piece of mahogany and a new set of grab rails out of driftwood teak. New hiking straps came from seatbelts out of a wreck at the junkyard.

I didn’t have a name at her launching but soon settled on ‘Fwa!’ which comes from Javier, my novice crew, who uses it as a catch-all expression so many times that his students actually call him that behind his back. On that first day, he uttered it every time we tacked, jibed or headed off the wind and came up on a plane. In English, it might be understood as, ‘Wow!’, ‘Holy Sh*t!’, ‘WTF?’, ‘You’ve Got to Be Kidding!’, ‘Oh My God!’ or, as I prefer, ‘That’s Frackin’ Fast!’