Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Further adventures in green tomatoes
So, yeah, I went dinghy racing on Sunday.
I'd just rather not talk about it, OK?
Let's talk about green tomatoes some more. I want to talk about green tomatoes. And beer. Hooray for green tomatoes and beer. I am just having more fun with all of these green tomatoes!
Last night's variation on the theme: Simply sauteed with onion and a couple more jalapenos, tossed with pasta and homemade pesto. Very easy, very yummy. Served with Ayinger Oktoberfest lager bought from Dean and DeLucca (SO dangerous to enter that store on the way home, but I'd gone in because I had a yen to try something new, this was a surprisingly reasonably-priced beer for D&D, and it turned out to be very nice). Shared with my honey after a smartphone glitch led to us having dinner plans where we hadn't originally. Drat that modern technology! ;D
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5 comments:
Please talk about it.
Aw heck. I just talked about it, and then Blogger randomly decided that I needed to sign in this time & lost my comment in the sign-in process. Try again:
Basically, though, it was tough conditions (very shifty and one of our better sailors described the windspeed as we were launching) as zero gusting to twenty. The gusts did settle down to more like 15 during the afternoon but it was still very tricky conditions and I was feeling like I was reliving my first dinghy race. Only 3 years later, I have higher expectations for myself and get commensurately more frustrated when I still can't seem to get to the mark in anything remotely resembling an efficient fashion.
Still, I didn't actually get lapped this time and the race committee didn't pack up the finish line and go home this time. And between the water now being cold enough to require wetsuits (I went with my drysuit with one very light layer 'cause according to the forecast, I was quite likely to go swimming), most of the people who came out for this one are much more serious racers than I am.
I just wish I could have stayed with one of them to see what they were doing. Tried to but I just couldn't seem to keep up.
I did throw one race because I was far enough behind and the course was long enough that I just didn't want to make everybody else wait for me - botched what I'd thought was going to the last tack coming into the last mark rounding (think that was the one where I hung up my hair in one of the fittings in the boom...stupid hair), recovered to find that I'd lost too much ground & was going to have to do another tack & just said "eff it" (well, no, that's not what I said but this blog features parental controls -- my parents read it).
Will try again on Sunday. Hope conditions are a little less annoying!
Thanks. Dinghy racing can be very frustrating at times, especially when sailing in conditions on the edge of or outside your comfort zone.
But that's life, ain't it?
Oh, and when Blogger is playing those silly "you need to sign on again" games after writing a long comment, I always copy the comment to the clipboard first before playing the games. Sometimes you don't seem to need to and sometimes you do. Never have figured out when you do so I try and remember to play it safe.
I usually do that - just didn't think of it this time.
One thing that did make me feel a little better - in one of my worst starts (one where I ran aground and was still trying to find my way into deep enough water to drop my centerboard when the first signal of the 2-minute start was sounded), I found myself right on Jim's heels. This was confusing. Jim is one of our sailing committee co-chairs, likes to sail a Sunfish, and habitually beats the Lasers in said Sunfish (remember that article in Sailing World about the Sebago Cup, where they mentioned that a Sunfish sailor has won the cup? That was Jim). He's just a really, really good sailor (builds boats, too).
He explained what had happened afterwards - first couple of races, he'd had excellent luck getting up a head of steam heading for the starting line from a ways back. This time, the wind completely dropped away around him, right in the middle of his final approach. After that he went to just luffing at the line and sheeting in at the last minute.
So I wasn't the only one who was having issues. I just let myself get flummoxed, I think.
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