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We have good news and bad news. The bad news is that we couldn’t sail this weekend, which means that our season is over. The good news is that we grew a lot as sailors this year and have a lot of accomplishments on which to reflect.

This weekend was pretty rough. Jen had specifically cleared her schedule so that we could sail both days, and we had planned to sneak in a couple trips with people who hadn’t been able to sail with us yet this year. That was all dashed when a freak winter storm brought 40kt winds from the nor’east. It cleared out yesterday and we went down today with the hopes of sailing, but it was still gusty and quite cold and we decided to just pull the cushions and canvas as step one of our winterizing effort.

Still, we had a good season. Here are some highlights (prepared by Jen):

  • We made several improvements to the boat, which makes us feel like we’re real boat owners. It’s one thing to have a boat, another to make it what you really want.
  • We had to mess with the mast twice (down, up, down, up), which was a lot of masting.
  • Getting our Windjammers burgee in May felt like a really big moment.
  • Hurricane weekend was crazy. The prep for moving Fortuitous to Val’s house was painful. Some guy at Trixie’s said, sometime in what must have been Jen’s 57th hour there, that she didn’t look happy. All she could do was agree. But in the end, we were glad to get the boat out of the flood zone, and being stormed in for the weekend was kind of nice. We were also excited to see our boat on the news.
  • Beach Haven was our biggest trip, by a lot, at that point. The sail home was really awful, in a great way. When we finally got home, Jen felt like we’d saved ourselves from a desert island. We did it, and we sailed damn near the whole way.
  • Building on the confidence gained from Beach Haven, we topped it for distance with our trip to Tuckerton. And we did it by ourselves, with a little help from Navionics. We didn’t do much of anything in town, with a storm coming on Sunday, but we were so happy that we would have stayed an extra day if not for the weather. We got home in time to miss the sky falling out, and it turned out to be perfect. We were really proud of ourselves.
  • We were first to Cattus Island this year, which was a major departure from last year. Jen was especially excited to have made the bridge open for us.

I’d add that racing with My Mojo and the East End Yacht Club was a lot of fun, and got me a lot more time on the water. After a bit of a shaky start, we finished first in our class for the Spring Series and second in the Summer. I also earned my Providence II Racing Crew shirt, and I think we went undefeated on the year (at least on actual time).

We missed a ton of sailing time this season for weather and land-based obligations, but when we sailed, we sailed pretty hard.

A few final ancillary thoughts:

  • I feel like the boat log is coming along well. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our last post was node 100, which means that we’re got just under 100 log entries since some nodes are static pages like the Links or Forecasts pages. That’s kind of a big milestone. As of this moment, we’re sitting at 72,796 hits for the year (which is kind of a bogus stat…Google Analytics has us at 3,740 page views) and a whole 9 followers on the Twitter.

Holy crap! If anything could possibly soothe the pain of winterizing the boat, it would be setting sail for some really smooth music in 1080p. I’d like to thank Koko Goldstein, aka Krell Krell Krell Krell Krell Krell, the Space God of Smooth Music and Seafaring, for another magical season of sailing.

 

 

"Prepare to fend off the bridge abutment."