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Spring Sailing

Ben and I have both been honing our sailing skills this year. Back in March, I enrolled in a US Sailing Keelboat sailing class at Mission Bay Aquatic Center. You might be wondering why a girl with a boat would bother taking a class when she can learn through trial and error right here at home. I am the type of girl who needs to feel competent away from my man. It seems to be a running joke among the men on the mooring field that their wives or girlfriends couldn't save them if they fell overboard. Those jokes aren't funny to me, and I'm happy to report I took the written exam a couple weeks ago and passed. So I am now a US Sailing certified Keelboat sailor. I learned tons of cool stuff, like how to tie a bowline without looking in a book (finally!), how to rig a boat, how to heave-to, the Figure-8 and Quick-Stop man overboard drills, among other things. And the best part is, now I can rent a boat anywhere in the U.S.A! (I know, I know, we already have a boat. But if we fly somewhere, we can't take our boat with us!)

As you can see in the picture above, Ben has been getting his share of sailing practice, too. Recently, he's been perfecting his skills around the Bay on Joe & Julie's "Bad Seed."

Memorial Day Sail

I thought I'd have more time to blog this summer but I decided to take a couple 6-week summer courses, so those have taken precedence for now. Hopefully, I'll make more time to write when I finally have a break in July and August. Although I haven't had a chance to write, I did find time to squeeze in some sailing. On Memorial Day, our neighbors Joe and Julie hijacked another neighbor's beautiful Hans Christian 38' and took Ben, Lola and I along for the ride. Joe tried to get me at the helm, but I have a strict policy of NOT captaining a boat that I can't afford to replace... so other than trying out the wheel for a few minutes (so different from our tiller steering!), I left the dirty work to the others and sat back and enjoyed the ride. The rollers were pretty big out in the ocean so we headed back towards home and bumped into some friends along the way. Here are some pics:

Sailing On Point