A visit to CERN is not complete without sailing on Lac Leman!
We took advantage of Sunday 13th August,Tim, Bella, Ru, Casey’s last weekend at CERN.
To get into the mood, a few days earlier Tim and Maria watched a captivating stormy adventure on 2019 Bol D’or on YouTube.
We booked one of the keel boats at the Yachting Club CERN (YCC). Very similar to the MIT sailing club, YCC brings together sailors of all ages and it’s also open to CERN alumni or external members with the common goal of practicing the art of sailing. The club is run like our research units, the more experienced train future skippers, we do our own maintenance (like we continuously fix and improve our detectors), …
The YCC fleet is located in Port Choiseul, 10 km away from the heart of Geneva. Our boat for the day was “JEDI”, a very robust J80. Yes, all the YCC boats have fancy names. “Padawan” (J70), “Photon” (laser), Bella asked if we had the “Higgs”, of course we do ; “Quantum Cat” (foiling Nacra), “RocketScience” (Dinghy), “Neutrino” a fast and sporty 29er that likes to escape … Discover the fleet!
Sunday Aug13 was very sunny, around 30 degC. You can see a picture of us on JEDI at the harbor, ready to leave the shore.
The wind came from Geneva! so we went upwind! Once out the harbor Tim helped hoist the mainsail, and we all removed the fenders.
Gust at 5bft!!! Not bad for the first outing. You can see what has been recorded between 3-6pm during our outing.
We reefed the main sail, otherwise the boat would be healing a lot from the wind. “Tack” and “Gybe” became part of our vocabulary and we learned the strategic distribution of weight to balance the wind power: i.e. we were all on one side and at a certain moment we had all our legs out.
We do not have many photos upwind, too focused on operations. Casey was in number one position and in charge of telling when a gust was approaching by looking at the color of the water or if some other small catamaran, stand up paddle, windsurf was on our way. We had to “bare away” or “luff up” to skip the other boats crossing our line.
Before the outing Ru had planned to jump and swim, but while sailing at that speed nobody asked anymore …
We reached the “Jet d’Eau” and started our down-wind leg. Was a good moment to take a picture with the jet d’eau in our back.
Going downwind it doesn’t look like we’re going fast, but actually we were; we also had time to admire the real estate of the Swiss shoreline.
It was a very nice day. Too bad Dennis had already left. It has been very nice to have our UROP students Casey, Tim, Ru, Bella, and Dennis in our CERN offices over the summer!