The Pirate Princess: Return to the Emerald Isle Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chocomount Cove, which she kept in sight over the bow. She just had to tweak her course every now and again to avoid certain things she had been trained to look for on the surface of the water.
    Shay had taught Meg to read the water like a book. Meg was always looking ahead for cat’s paw patches , where a light wind ripples the surface of the water and could cause her to lose speed. When the waves in front of the sailboat went from long and slow to short and fast, Meg knew that the seabed was closer to the surface of the water and that she had to avoid the shallow water. This is called wave shoaling . Meg knew to read these and other signs from the surface of the water to help her on the course she was sailing.
    As she turned starboard off of the island’s shore, the wind was now directly behind the boat. This left Meg a couple of options on how to approach the next leg. She could turn the boat so that the wind was directly aft of the boat, and let out each sail as far as they could go on both sides so that they looked like a pair of wings. This is called butterflying . It was not her best option because a shift in the wind could cause one of the sails and its boom to violently swing in the opposite direction in an accidental jibe, which could snap the rigging, or worse, knock someone overboard. Shay and Meg only butterflied when they were alone and only with perfect wind. Meg decided instead to keep the wind on a broad reach, or just slanting to the rear of the Muirín, and start jibing towards the North and South Dumpling islands, her next landmark. It was a little slower but much safer.
    North Dumpling Island was a local legend. It was owned by the famous inventor of the Segway , the two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter. He had turned an old lighthouse into his residence and the island into a small compound. When the government turned down an attempt by him to build a wind turbine to power the island, he jokingly seceded from United States and refers to his property as the Kingdom of North Dumpling. The eccentric inventor even had a replica of Stonehenge built on the northeastern corner of the island. Meg kept this in her sight while doing controlled jibes port and starboard of the wind.
    The chain of islands the Murphy family lived around started in the sound and ended up in the ocean at the very popular Block Island. Fishers Island, where Nanny lived, was secluded and did not get the large number of visitors that Block Island, the next island up the east coast, received. Both islands were first charted in 1614 by Dutch explorer Adrian Block who named the larger island after himself. The smaller island, Nanny’s, was named either for Block’s First Mate Mr. Visscher or for the local Pequots who fished on this island they called Munnawtawkin, meaning place of observation . The Native American name was quite appropriate for Fishers Island, and the Murphy family spent a day every now and then walking around the island “observing” when they visited Nanny. Shay loved to show her kids where she grew up and Mark loved to gawk at the classic cars that traveled the island’s roads. There were not many cars on the island, but the few there were all seemed to be the most beautiful old cars from a bygone era.
    Meg turned the boat port after passing the Dumplings and headed up the west coast. The wind was now in front of them which made the sailing a little more challenging. Every sailboat has a no-go zone when headed windward . This is a thirty-to-fifty-degree arc where the wind cannot fill the sails to produce forward motion. When Meg turned the boat into the wind they were in the no-go zone for just a moment, but the boat drifted into a payoff and the wind filled the sheets again.
    A close haul is when the boat heads into the wind just slightly to one side of the no -go zone. This is when the telltales come in really handy. When beating into the wind, Meg paid close attention to the telltales and pulled the