After years of borrowing a laser class sailboat from the Snake Bay Sailing Club, The old club shut down and sold all the boats to members of Sunshine Coast Sailing Association SCSA.

This has great increased the number of boats we have sailing out on the water on any given day to 13 and it great to see the old SBSC boats out on the water again!

I was also able to acquire the boat I was borrowing for a number of years and as soon as I took ownership of it, stuff of course started breaking.

“Boat is a hole of which your pour money into.”

But it’s so much fun and worth the maintenance and upkeep.

The rivets popped on the gooseneck during a race and then a the metal gooseneck crack after 40 years of use.

I found that my mast step was also leaking which is an indication of frail mast step. I did pour some epoxy down the tube which stopped the leak but it didn’t resolve the entire problem.

During our yearly Poise Cove Regatta I was hiking out and reeling in the main sheet on route to the first race of the morning. Five seconds to the start and I heard a crack and the mast fell. Later inspection revealed the mast step had major fatigue. I don’t believe

reinforcing the mast step would have resolved this issue. As unhappy and expensive as a

mast step replacement is. It will be a solid replacement.

I also decided to replace the sail with a practice sail since the original one showed it’s years of wear. Since it was a practice sail and not an official laser class sail for

racing.  I could choose any numbers I wanted. In talking with Ben Lobaugh about which numbers to choose we joked about using the http status codes the most well known one being 404 which is file or page not found. Then we though what about 402 which is payment required. Which is quite appropriate for the sport of sailing.

We ended up deciding on the code 503 which mean “Server unavailable” This usually means the server has temporary stopped accepting request or it too busy.

Applying this to terminology to a human it could also mean. “Bugger off I am sailing” I will be back later.

To me sailing is a leaving all of the technology we use every day on the dock. Grab your tiller and and your main sheet and have some fun all the power you need will be in the wind.