simple pleasure

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Kevin in the US built his Navigator 'Slipjig' and has made some really charming videos of it including this latest of him with some friends, gathered for a week-end of sailing. This is how he explained the trip:

"...last weekend I and 8 friends (8 boats total) went on the 15th annual Chesapeake Bay "Float" weekend. On the trip were 4 Joel White designed Marsh Cats, a 16 foot Melonseed, a 1962 one design Celebrity, and an Edwin Monk design Curlew along with my Navigator "Slip Jig". The basic premise is to pick a spot on the Chesapeake that we haven't been before and go for a 3 day trip camp cruising trip(on the boats). Most years we seem to miss a day to bad weather but this year the weather was very cooperative and gave me a chance to sail for almost an entire day under mizzen and jib under a steady press of air. We bruised some waves as we headed out in the bay proper to a remote island and then headed back into the Little Choptank River to explore some of the many creeks. This river was especially nice due to the fact that there is very littledevelopment and lots of pristine spots. I made a video out of several clips I took, it certainly is not the quality of some that have been posted but I'm just learnin how to do this stuff and don't get paid to do it..."

This is a wonderful collection of boats, and their proximity to each other, and the constant views of Kevin's sails combine to give us a real sense of what the wind is doing and what the sailors are doing with it. Kevin's boat has certainly been one of the benchmarks for me in deciding to build a Navigator, and to build it with a gaff main in the yawl configuration.

I'm assuming that at the end of the film Kevin is sailing with his main down, under only jib and mizzen, as he had been earlier and doing very nicely, thank you, in front of the bigger cat boat with the reef in his main....but no-one here is competitive...