Happy New Year from Brooklyn!

Happy New Year from Brooklyn! Spent a nice chunk of the day talking story and sharing food with Sebago clubmates on the shore of the Paerdegat Basin. Although today we could've renamed it the Pae-BRRRRR-gat (instead of "pattergat" which is how you usually hear it pronounced)!

The usual tradition at the Sebago Canoe Club is for the more experienced paddlers and sailors to kick off the New Year with at least a short paddle or sail, but unfortunately all boating activities ended up being called off due to a forbiddingly icy and windy forecast. TQ and I had actually volunteered to lead the paddle. When we first started seeing forecasts for New Year's Day, conditions were challenging, but doable, with temperatures in the 20's and winds in the teens, then things started getting ugly - I checked in one afternoon late in the work week and the forecast was showing gusts close to 30 kts. Awww heck no!

Over the next couple of days, the windspeed projections for New Year's Day did  ease up a bit, but quite not enough, and the temperature gradually crept down. When it came time to make a go/no go call on Sunday, we were looking at a high temperature of 18 (which we wouldn't have gotten anywhere close to by our 10 am launch time, day's high would've been a bit later than that and the overnight lows were in the single digits) and NW winds gusting close to 25 kts. We've done paddles on days that cold. We've done paddles with winds that high. Not combined, though - put the two together and if something goes wrong, the situation could head south very fast. Frostbite paddles are much more fun with less risk of actual frostbite!

We called it off early in the afternoon on the 31st, and curiously enough, nobody seemed to be in the least upset with us!

Sailing committee called off their sail a little bit later, for the same reasons.

Real shame - I wish it had been either less cold or less windy or both, because remember how I was talking about "those sparkly blue winter days we get here" back on my trip report for my day-after-solstice solo paddle? Well, this was about as glorious an example of one of those as you'd want to see - just too darned cold!

Still a good day at the club, though - the traditional potluck went off beautifully, with the usual range of great food served in the warmth of the big wood stove in the clubhouse. TQ and I teamed up to make spam musubi, there was a request on FB that I make that for the New Year's Day party after I'd posted about making it for my high school friend's annual Hawaiian Christmas party; I was on the fence about it because it's kind of labor-intensive, but then TQ mentioned that he didn't know what to bring and it hit me that teaming up on the musubi might work well, which turned out to be the case! Folks liked it, too. Sorry, no pix this time but look back at my Christmas post and imagine the pieces cut a little smaller and not arranged in a Christmas tree and that's it. All kinds of other good stuff too - I've seen at least one cartoon from Hawaii making fun of a Mainland potluck vs. a potluck in Hawaii, and a potluck in Hawaii is indeed a splendiferous thing, but that cartoonist was clearly not talking about a Sebago potluck!

And the general meeting that is usually my least-favorite part of the New Year's Day proceedings (although it's gotten markedly better over the last few years, it used to run quite long but various officers decided it needed to go more quickly)? Well, I bundled up to go visit the facilities, and since I was bundled up I decided I would take advantage of it and go take some pictures of the basin too. Wanted to at least take a look at the water - it was freezing cold, yes, but excellently photogenic on at least the sunshine/blue sky front! Found some like-minded clubmates out there, chatted a bit, then went back in to discover that the meeting was over! Thought TQ pulling my leg at first when he told me I'd missed it (he's got an excellent deadpan face when he wants to) but nope! Has to be a record.

Back to work tomorrow, but a pretty good start to the year today. Even without a paddle. So glad I went for that long one the Friday before Christmas - I'd done that with the idea that I should grab the good paddling weather while I could, and I was oh so right!