Last Sail of 2011 - Friday, Dec. 30th

Happy Nearly New Year to All!

Heading down the Paerdegat

Quint & I will be welcoming the New Year in our usual way - a good dinner (steak, the rest of my chard & whatever TQ comes up with for another side, yum!) and a movie at home, avoiding the masses and letting us get up early enough in the morning to go join the annual Sebago Canoe Club New Year's Day Frostbite Paddle and Rolling Session. I'm actually posting while making my contribution to the post-paddle potluck. I'd considered spam musubi but that would've taken a little more ambition than I was able to come up with, plus a musubi mold - maybe I'll do that for the season opener, but for tomorrow, it's My Mom's Sugared Pecans.

So I'll be starting out the year in a kayak as usual - but my goodness, Holly and Jim the Sailing Co-Chairs (plus my frostbiting friend Chris) must actually be turning me into a little bit more of a sailor than I used to be, 'cause my last boating excursion of 2011 was NOT in my trusty Romany, but in the Sunfish known as Baby Blue.

This was pretty much weather driven. I've been on vacation for the last 2 weeks, and TQ and I got in some nice paddles over that time, the last one on Tuesday when we simply paddled straight out into a 20-kt headwind for an hour and a half or so on a gray and rainy day & then turned around & surfed home in half the time - but Chris and I had had a great sail during my late-October "staycation" & he'd mentioned that if I had time over the holidays and the weather cooperated, he would be interested in another.

Well, boy, did the weather ever cooperate on Friday. Unfortunately that was on a day when Chris had an unbreakable engagement, but fortunately (because I won't sail alone in the wintertime), Holly the Sailing Co-Chair was available & up for a sail.

Weather came out even better than forecast - up until Thursday night it had been showing winds around 9 kts, with a pretty good chance of drizzle. The drizzle abruptly vanished from the forecast Thursday evening and was replaced with "partly sunny" -- and in the end, there wasn't even any "partly" about it. Sunny, high was around 51, and just enough breeze to keep the boats moving. We did a counterclockwise circle around Canarsie Pol. We agreed afterwards that there was nothing aerobic about it (although I did get to huffing and puffing a little bit when I saw Holly do a roll-tack and asked her about it & she tried to teach me - in the end I decided I would probably do better to come back to those in the summertime when falling backwards off of your boat is fun but I did work up a sweat trying it a few times) but what a lovely leisurely end to my 2011 boating year!

Here are a few more pictures from the sail. What a day.

Looking up the Paerdegat.

Holly, just outside the bridge


Heading out into the bay

Holly said there should be a picture of me, so I took one!

Lazy downwind leg behind Canarsie Pol. Holly gave me some pointers on sailing by the lee, great conditions for playing with stuff like that.



A million brants flew by us, hrrrnk! hrrrnk! hrrnk! There was a loon out there too, we didn't see it but we heard the unmistakable laugh a couple of times.

Bye bye brants, and bye bye Holly - I'd lost track of my steering scrambling to get a picture of Holly with the brants it the background! BTW, just click on any of the pictures to get a bigger version - this one you can't see the brants too well in the smaller one but they ARE there.

Sparkles & wake. We're not sure the wind even got up to the 8kts that had been called for, but there was always enough to keep the boats moving - launching to landing, our circumnavigation of Canarsie Pol was completed in an hour and a half.

Back up the Basin -

Dock, sweet dock.

And that's it for 2011 here on Frogma - Hau'oli Makahiki Hou to all, see you in 2012!