Docking - X Games Style

It seems as though we always like to come into port hot, right before or exactly as the weather is changing for the worst. It's not an exact science but we try to time our arrival to the next town at least 1-2 hours before the bad weather/winds/waves are scheduled to hit.

Well, we left Saugatuck for Grand Haven right after a lovely homemade breakfast giving us enough time to get to Grand Haven's Municipal Marina.  While we were out on the water, we decided to sail as much as we could, having to tack a handful of times, so this lengthened our trip. We easily out ran the rain (it wasn't supposed to hit for at least 3 hours after we docked) but the wind had already picked up and was gusting pretty strong when we were making our way up the Grand River.

Grand Haven's Municipal Marina is right on the river and not protected at all so when docking we not only had the strong gusts of wind to deal with but also the current of the river. We have learned that the best way for us to dock is into the wind. Why fight against mother nature when you can use her to your advantage! To do this, we had to pass our slip while heading east turn 180 degrees and come into the slip heading west (into the wind). The thought is that the wind will push your boat to where it needs to go and you can balance it with the motor. Unfortunately as we turned to prepare to dock, the wind picked up, of course, why make it easy. Brady was going almost full throttle into the wind, aiming the nose of Further directly into the piling splitting the two joining slips hoping to clear it (think, we were basically at a 45 degree angle to the dock) and as soon as we did, he cut back on the throttle so I could hook the spring line on the nearest cleat and try to ease the boat to the dock before mother nature slammed us right up against it. The slam wasn't too bad since we had control of the whole thing but once we rehashed it over again, it could have only taken a half a second slip-up to either run aground on the rocks not even 5 feet in front of us or hit the boat to our starboard.


Needless to say we once again pulled an amazing docking job out of our butts, without much talking, because we just intuitively knew what we both had to do. When we were all tied off, one of the girls who worked at the marina who came out to help us commented on how easy we made it look! (We have learned the hard way to ask the dock hands not to grab our spring line and to let me place it on the cleat by their feet then I'll had them our bow and stern lines. These kids are really nice and mean well but we know we can dock better on our own.) Yet another experience we wish we had the go pro set up to show how crazy of a moment this was!