Thursday, we adjusted schedules and headed to Beatties Ford. The weather services were predicting 12 mph with gusts to 21 out of the southwest. It was just too delicious to pass up. My guest for the day was again Alan. We launched about 12:00 noon. The wind was blowing about 14 mph at launch with white caps.

We quickly found out that the wind was blowing hard, very hard. We had difficulty tacking. We were spilling a lot of wind to keep us from capsizing. Because we let the sails out, we could not point up higher.  We sailed south toward the nuclear power plant. We wind came in waves with long puffs and short lulls. The waves were 12” to 18” with a few 24” after large boats passed by. There were almost no clouds in the sky. The wind kept increasing as we sailed toward an island, then tacked to starboard. We sailed toward a shoal marker on a close haul on port tack. We went to the lee of the marker but the wind was so relentless that I did not feel comfortable about tacking. We were running out of water, so I decided to come about and run back. When we turned, we came back to a beam reach. The wind hit us hard as the boom swung around the boat lunched over and water came over the slash rail on the seat. We thought we were going to capsize, but the very stable Javelin turned on into the wind and righted! We brought the boat to a broad reach a very quickly made our way to the middle of the almost 2 mile wide channel. We jibed with some difficultly to center us into the channel. We got a good lay line to the dock and I aimed to windward to the dock. We ran quickly on a beam to the dock, with spray splashing over the bow! We dropped the sails and drifted safely into the dock. We were only out for 1.5 hours. What a crazy ride. I called Beth and she noted the Weather Channel said that the wind was at 19 mph. The Weather Bureau said that the maximum sustained wind was 22 mph and the maximum gust was 28 mph. This was the highest wind speed I have ever been out in, or ever hope to.