Orient Point with the Sebago Canoe Club, 8/8/2015

So yes, of COURSE I'll be continuing with my post-blogging (as opposed to live-blogging, which I've just never been able to quite bring myself to do) of my wonderful-although-entirely-too-short trip back to da 'aina, but after coming back from vacation into a crazy close week at work and then hurtling on into an intense day at Orient Point, so feeling quite lazy tonight, I figured I would share some pix from Orient Point first. TQ and I led a Tides and Currents out there - it was a good group, all experienced; waves in the area of standing waves were kind of washing machiney, but we got through those OK, even if we didn't get the kind of rides you'd like. One of the group unfortunately wasn't feeling well and ended up going back to the beach to wait, which was too bad, but the others had a good time.

We fortunately had the lighthouse to ourselves, sometimes there are fishing boats fishing there but not this time, which meant we could practice entering and exiting eddies on both sides (usually we do this at Democrat Point, which means a single practice eddy at a point so all work is on one side, so being able to alternate peelouts and re-entries on both sides was cool), and when we were getting hot we did some work on recoveries (aka "rescues", but the idea is that it's not a rescue 'til the Coast Guard has to help). We were also fortunate in that the jellyfish which can sometimes dampen the fun of a good rough-water play session at Orient Point were all over by Shelter Island, the quiet-water paddlers reported tons, I don't think we saw one.  

The day was gorgeous, pleasant temperatures and not too windy -- lack of wind was nice for the paddling, but sucked for the annual small craft race around Shelter Island, which sailing co-chairs Holly and Jim had come out for. I was quite bummed for Holly, I think this was her first time doing this race and it seems like a fun one, but this year only the catamaran class had much luck, Lasers and Sunfish were almost all DNF. I thought it was pretty cool that Holly was there representing the club, and I was sorry when we ran into Jim (who was on call as Holly's ground support but doing a little touring around in the meantime) at the Orient Point ferry landing and he told us the situation - that was around 4, I think, so there were a couple of hours left in the race (they had something like a 6 hour limit from the last start, which was Lasers at 1:30, so that people wouldn't be out there in the dark), but his estimate was already that most boats were working hard going nowhere and probably weren't going to finish. Better luck to them next year.

There was a rainbow around the sun when we landed back at the Orient Point ferry terminal, neat to see.

The day ended with a lovely sunset and the usual way too much wonderful food and fun of the traditional Saturday night potluck.

Seems like staying Sunday night would really be the thing to do if you can swing a vacation day on Monday; I couldn't have done that but as it was I was kind of wiped out on Sunday and facing another week of too many deadlines at work, so although another good paddle and meal were planned for Sunday, I didn't feel up for it. Ended up being nice, though - we slept in at the campground, had a leisurely breakfast, were still on our way home before the traffic got too bad (that's always the trade-off for a Sunday paddle if you AREN'T staying up there Sunday night - a couple of hours of paddling just automatically means lots of extra traffic misery, the later you go, the worse it gets) and then after splitting off for a couple of hours for unpacking, showering, and dozing, TQ and I reconvened for dinner at a good local Mexican place and then just spent a nice evening hanging out together - we don't get a lot of time to just chill together during the summertime as our schedules are misaligned, so that was a lovely way to wrap up the weekend.

And that's how the weekend went, and here are the pix - no more writing so click on the first one for the slideshow view.