Die Reisen des Spidermans

During one of my trips to Berlin (the one in January, I think), Bine and I stopped at the Flea Markt at Mauerpark.  It is (one of) the largest established flea markets in Europe.  It's full of amazing furniture, worthless junk, hand-crafted jewelry, DDR relics and it's my favorite place to shop.  While there, we picked up a pair of finger puppets. 

Mine is the very small Spiderman on the left, hers the miscolored Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on the right.  He's wearing both blue and orange so we named him Donatello.  We decided that these could be our own sort of personal Flat Stanley project, and we could take pictures with them wherever we went.  So Spidey has been accompanying me all around Germany.

He enjoys trips on the Deutsche Bahn.  This is actually the cute little Regional train that zips between Kiel and Lübeck and I take to school every morning, though I only go a couple of stops.

This past weekend, we went to Husum, which is an idyllic little seaside town over on the North Sea.  It doesn't look it from this picture, I know, but I had walked about as far along this little wharf as I could before it turned into industrial docks, so I turned around for the shot of the town.

While attempting to find the beach, I got a little lost.  Somehow, my little brightly colored seaside town had turned into rural farms full of horses and sheep and the occasional car.

But the first trip he accompanied me on was the one to Heidelberg, before I had quite figured out the settings on the camera to allow me to focus on two things.  This is Spiderman posing with a unicorn riding a giraffe in a shop window.

In possibly one of the least focused pictures I have ever taken, Spiderman poses with a rather famous monkey statue, still in Heidelberg.  In my defense, it's very hard to hold a dSLR with one hand while taking a picture of a finger puppet on your other hand.  It's not really what it was designed for.

And, of course, back in his hometown of Berlin at the Reichstag, the seat of German government.  Someday, he'll get out of Germany.  Most likely when I do.

Ansegeln?

All things considered, my German’s not that bad.  But every now and then, words still slip past me.  A couple of weeks ago at the Yacht Club meeting, someone mentioned something about “ansegeln” at this upcoming regatta.  I figured this just meant sailing alongside.  Obviously not on the Arndt, which was going to be the committee boat, so I signed up for the other of the larger boats.  What I didn’t realize was that all the other boats were, in fact, racing.

I signed up with my friends Svitlana and Anke on the Aegir, nearly identical to the Arndt, both about 40 feet long and your basic modern sloop.  I arrived at the harbor on Sunday morning and called Svitlana to find out what boat I had signed up for.  That cleared up, I climbed aboard and started sail prep.

Now, the first time I went out with the Yacht Club (on the Arndt), it was night time, below freezing and super windy and we had just rigged the boat, so we didn’t put up any sails.  The second time, we had just launched and fully rigged Taffi and were all excited to sail, but there was no wind.  The third we actually went sailing.  So this was really only the second time I’d done proper sail prep and everything.

I put on my foulie pants, belted on my new knife and did as many things as I could remember needed to be done.  We got a jib out of the forepeak, found and bent on the sheets, prepped all of the other lines (mostly comprised of pulling them out of a bag and throwing them down the companionway), uncovered and untied the main and generally got things ready.

As we cast off, I ended up on the bow lines with a dude whose name I never actually learned.  We cast off the lee side bow line and held the windward side so that it would slip and we could ease it as we backed out of our berth.

 

 It looked something like that.

I hadn’t intended to do anything super complicated, but as we set the mainsail, I was the closest to the sheet, so I grabbed it.  Someone had to.  The Yacht Clubbers worried that I wasn’t wearing gloves, so the helmsman/skipper Dieter loaned me his.  Thank God he did.  Having not been sailing on a tall ship since August, my hands are no longer the impervious calloused sailor hands of awesome that we would show off to children.  (“Hey kids!  Wanna see what the life of a sailor was like?  Look at our 

bosun’s hands!”)

So, let’s set the scene.  Here I am, sitting in the cockpit, borrowed gloves on my hands, working the main sheet and waiting more experienced to take it from me.  The wind is between 20 and 25 knots and we’re going 8 without even trying.  Announcements start coming through the radio and people start discussing the racecourse and I slowly realize that we’re actually racing in this thing and everyone else has a line and I’m pretty much stuck on the main.

We run through a couple of tacks and I learn the vocab I need to know.  “Klar zu wenden!” “Ist klar!” “Groß aufmachen.“ “Groß dichter.“ “Gut so, fest machen.“  “Ready about!“ “Ready!“ “Ease the main.“ “Trim the main.“ “That’s good, make it fast.“  I learn how to move in the very small cockpit, how to position myself to haul and ease and all manner of useful things.

The race itself was pretty typical, I imagine.  It was full of yelling, other boats in extremely close proximity, near misses and some awesome sailing.  We tacked across the start line, nearly hit another boat on our way to the first mark, and took a comfortable beam reach down into the Kiel Foerde to the second mark.  The second mark was at Reventloubruecke, where there was a large festival and rubber ducky race, so there were a lot of people on shore.

Once we rounded it and headed back up the foerde, my real work began.  Into the foerde had been comfortable, so of course heading back out was not.  We sailed up at a tight close reach and at every gust, I had to quickly and correctly ease the main so that we didn’t capsize and then sheet it back in afterwards to keep us on course.  On Tuesday, I had been on the steering end of this maneuver, throwing all of my strength into the tiller as the wind shoved us around.  Being on the sheet was difficult and it took me a bit to develop a technique to knock the sheet out of the clamp with my foot while holding it fast with my hands and then easing it, but I eventually got the feel of it.  The Germans even stopped having to tell me to ease.  I do love sailing schooners, but working this mainsail was an amazing way to see the application of sail theory and to really understand how it works.

My hands were cramping by the time we hit the third mark, but we rounded it and headed into a dead run before the wind to the finish.  Running before the wind is tense, because if you get a little bit off, you can accidentally jibe, and your main sail will come slamming across the boat.  So, I had to keep hold of the line and keep my head out of the way just in case I needed to sheet in as fast as I possibly could.  We didn’t accidentally jibe, pulled an intentional tack and crossed the finish line.

We sailed back to our berth comfortably, sharing cookies and snacks and with no more yelling.  Throughout the race we had passed several tall ships, including my very favorite tiny little brigantine and the three-masted topsail schooner Thor Heyerdahl.  I’d hoped to see more of them on the way back, but they were all already out sailing.

Sail dropping was nicely undramatic and then we had to circle around three times and wait in line to get back into the harbor.  My part of the docking was smooth, but on starboard, they broke a fender line and may have scuffed the paint on the neighboring boat.  We put everything away then shared some cake that had inexplicably gotten salt water in it while I taught/showed off knots.

Then I got a ride home with Svitlana in her Citroen Ente and didn’t realize until I got to my room that my hair looked insane.  Thanks, wind, for turning me into Albert Einstein.  All the more reason for a haircut.