Sailing, take me away...

This isn't exactly a how-to, but this is probably the most extreme thing that we have created. As newlyweds in the summer of 2008 we got on the topic of sailing and realized that growing up, each of us had dreamed of someday being able to sail. We looked on the ksl.com classifieds and sailboats were way out of our price range.

So, I said, "Why don't we just build one?"

We looked up homemade sailboats and found that a man had built a sailboat out of a raft - the same one Craig had for white water rafting! He wanted a few hundred dollars for the plans, so in the end we built our own. It was a lot more complicated, with a more intricate frame and a jib (the smaller sail) in addition to the main sail.

We were living in our tiny duplex at the time, but we had a small yard out front, which is where we did most of our building and assembling. Oh, and the whole thing fits into our Ford Focus in the background.

The process was very technical, actually. After the first couple of tries out on Utah Lake and Jordanelle Reservoir, Craig put his math skills to work to calculate the perfect angles for our wires that hold the mast, keeping it from leaning and bending and he put his K'Nex skills to work, testing the strength of the angles of the guide wires with a K'Nex sailboat and fishing wire, without having to apply them to the whole sailboat first.

I can't remember how many test-runs we made, but each time brought up a new problem that we had to fix: the mast would completely bend and we would have to figure out a way to better strengthen it or we could sail across a whole reservoir only to have our sail grab so little wind on the way back that we had to paddle all the way to shore, leading to the addition of a jib.

Our first perfect sail at Flathead Lake in MT

At the end of the summer, we made our final sail. It was perfect, except that we were going so fast that we sailed right into the rocky edge of Utah Lake, breaking off one of the paddles on the side that served to keep us straight.

It wasn't until the summer of 2009 that we had a perfect sail on the beautiful Flathead Lake in Montana.