Let's Learn A Word In Irish!

Bundún or bun dún - pronounced "bun doon" - backside.

Use: Annalise Murphy kicked some serious bundún today!

I had actually not managed to watch any Olympics yet, but this morning one of the other Sebago sailors sent out a link to streaming video of one of the Laser radial races that was going on RIGHT THEN and I couldn't resist watching for a bit. Fortunately I'd signed on 2 mark turns before the end so I don't have TOO much time to make up. Glad I caught what I did, though, it was awesome. Jeeze, was this lady fast!!!

picture lifted from TheJournal.ie - usually I don't lift pictures, but it's just so perfect. My impression of her sailing was that she'd somehow fitted out her boat with some sort of maglev device. Not so much sailing as flying low, y'know?

Uh oh

This blog was about something before it was about sailing in the Baltic...what was it again? It's been so long!

Lovely Lagers!

Carib, Anegada, British Virgin Islands, November 2005

Kona Brewing Co. Longboard Lager, Turtle Bay Hilton, Oahu, Hawaii, July 2010

Karjala, Pihlajassari, Helsinki Harbor, Finland, July 2012

Anybody thirsty now? :D

Baltic Adventure Part 10 - Back to Tallinn

One more item from Suomenlinna - great big ship goes through a little tiny slot. I had just passed the King's Quay when I saw the cruise ship. I never would've thought a vessel that size would be able to go through the narrow pass between the islands, but this one came steaming that way perfectly confidently! And now, back to Tallinn - Journal entry, 6/21/2012 (as written - not much to elaborate on this one!)

Last day of sailing, we are headed back from Suomanlinna to Tallinn. We set sail at 6 am, sailed until around 8, then the wind died about 5 miles north about 5 miles north of the Helsinki light, so we are now motoring across the Gulf of Finland, leaving a trail of pistachio shells and Pringles crumbs behind us.

We've optimistically left up the main, the wind is supposed to come up again in the afternoon, so we hope to get a little more sailing in before we dock. On the plus side, it's a beautiful day and the Gulf is totally flat - with the winds we had over the week the Gulf was pretty wavy and we were afraid we'd be motoring in that and I'm the only one who hasn't gotten seasick yet, so wallowing across the waves wouldn't have been fu. However, it's nice and smooth and sunny, so we're OK.

A few pix from the sail back

Containership in the Gulf

Tallinn 1 - first of 3 clear-water marks leading us back into Tallinn Harbor

The Lulu, another member Sailing.ee's fleet, heading out for an evening

The spires of Tallinn

Isolda II

Isolda II & Keila

8:05 pm - We made it back OK, the wind even picked up enough to give us some good sailing for the last 15 miles or so. That same wind was blowing us onto our dock, making for a bit of a rough docking, but we lived to tell the tale. Now, dinner, shopping, clean hot showers in the Old City Marina office (yay!), and our last night of sleeping on the boat. Hope my postcards make it to their destinations, I mailed them but forgot to write "USA" on them. Great trip, wish we could stay for another week!

Final notes:
Boat - the Wesilind, Elan 344 Impression, home port Orjako, Estonia. 10.46 meters long, 3.49 wide
Charter company: Sailing.ee (on the web at  http://www.sailing.ee )
Itinerary:
Day 1 - Tallinn to Naisaar then back due to forecast. 20 miles of sailing (10 out, 10 back)
Day 2 - Stayed in port in the rain.
Day 3 - Tallinn to Lähteelä - charted distance 36 miles, more like 50 because we overshot a turn!
Day 4 - Lähteelä to Elisaari - 20 miles.
Day 5 - Elisaari to Pihlajassari - 41.7 miles
Day 6 - Pihlajassari to Suomenlinna - short hop, half an hour's sail
Day 7 - Suomenlinna to Tallinn - 55 miles

Prows

A few more from Suomenlinna. Short & sweet, just for a break in a series that's leaned more to the long & loquacious, if not downright logorrheic".

Only one more day in the journal now - sailing back to Tallinn.

Baltic Adventure Part 9: Day 5 - Pihlajasaari to Suomenlinna

Trip journal, 6/20/2012 - with a ton of supplemental photos! Click on any picture for details.

Our shortest day of sailing - literally maybe half an hour from launch to our arrival in Suomenlinna. We were glad that we skipped the extra loop around Helsinki Harbor we'd thought of adding to our sail to make a better sail because as it was, we got in right as it was getting full...

Actually we found a spot right away, and pulled on in, but then...

we took a better look at the boats to starboard, and then we took a better look...

at the boats to port, and then we took a look at our comfy, beamy, fiberglassy charter boat and went "hmmm". Capt. Kat went ashore to confirm the suspicion that had arisen as we regarded our elegant neighbors, and whaddayaknow, this was NOT the public dock! Oops.  Like we'd been saying ever since  Kat had completely put everyone at the kiosk in Elisaari in stitches when she first said it, "We're Americans, we don't know anything!" - but we were able to figure this one out before anyone had to come explain things to us! We pulled out of here & pretty quickly figured out that the public dock was the one across the basin that several boats had pulled into while we tied up at a private yacht club. Oops. 

We drove around in circles for an hour or so - fortunately there were lots of interesting things to look at while we did--

hovercraft!

Schooner!

Outside view of the oldest functioning commercial drydock in the world (although we didn't know that yet) -

and all sorts of really interesting wooden boats - my wooden-boat-loving friends would be in heaven!

as we circled, other boats were coming in, some of them went ahead and negotiated with the earlier arrivals and squeezed into spots that we wouldn't have dared to (partly because we were in somebody else's boat, partly because negotiation requires language skills),

others joined us in the circling queue, and finally a very nice gentleman who was walking down the dock shouted out to us and indicated that he and his crew were about to leave. Their boat was at least the size of ours and they'd been tied up alongside the dock right at the end, we really couldn't have asked for a nicer spot - we felt VERY lucky. It was Midsummer's Eve, it was gorgeous weather, and by the evening there were close to 60 boats crowded into a harbor meant for 40. We were very relieved not to have had to negotiate snuggling up...this was the scene at the end of the dock at the end of the day, 5 boats shoehorned in in a spot that technically may not have been an official spot at all!

we did have somebody ask if they could raft up outside of us - we told they could, but we really needed to leave at 6 am (that was true), and they ended up tying up to the bulkhead instead (a few others did that too) - it was really, really tight!

We had a great lunch at a little cafe right by the marina - we'd been very good about eating on the boat up until then, but we'd driven in circles well into lunchtime and when we went ashore to pay our night's docking fee, I saw a dish of pasta with spinach and smoked salmon go by, begged the rest of the gang to have lunch there, and didn't have to beg too hard. It was a delicious lunch.

After that, we set out to explore. There are 4 islands in this little cluster, all attached by bridges. I think we could've spent a couple of days here easily -- I only made it to 2 of the 4, because I had to go see the Vesikko, Finland's only submarine - 

and go exploring in a boatyard,

and take more pictures of geese, and poke around the spooky tunnels in the fortress walls, and look at art exhibits, and go hunting for this famous apple pie with custard sauce at the Toy Museum Cafe (closed for Midsummer's, augh!) and I just generally failed to sightsee at the pace I would've had to maintain to get to all 4 islands. 

But I thoroughly enjoyed the parts I did manage to see - especially the boats. They have such lovely wooden boats here, all shapes and sizes -

and they have the world's oldest operating drydock -

It's just really a fascinating place to poke around.

I ended up buying my only souvenirs (assuming you don't count the reindeer soup, the Estonian liqueurs, and the moose sausage that I picked up to take home) here - early in the sightseeing, I got 2 little copper Vesikko pins (one for me, one in case my dad wants one), and then later on I went into a shop that features the work of the various craftspeople who have studios on the island. They had some beautiful vases, but I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get one home in one piece (plus they were displayed with a basket of glass balls in a window and I wasn't sure if just one would look as nice, especially without the illumination of the lovely Scandinavian midsummer sunlight) -

but they also had some inexpensive but very attractive pendants that looked like they'd travel better, and they had a couple in a beautiful shade of blue-green that reminded me of the water we'd been sailing on all week, so I got one of those.

We'd all split off for the sightseeing, but eventually found our way back to the Wesilind for appetizers, dinner, and a couple of drinks.

We heard the trumpeter that plays from the tower of Suomenlinna Church every night at 9, and there was lots of other music too, Midsummer's Eve felt fun and festive - in the cafe, there was crazy Finnish surf punk band playing -

handsome husky waits for his owners - 

out on the docks, everything felt very laid back - this guy had decided to take his kayak/tender out for a spin; other people were just hanging out on their boats, talking and laughing - 

the family with the kids who'd been fishing off the dock the night before had turned up here and the children were fishing again, actually caught a tiny little fish; on one boat I walked past as I made one of my last trips ashore for evening toilet (in both senses of the word), somebody was playing a guitar and was singing "Pretty Woman" in Finnish.

We were a little bit worried when a boatload of teenagers pulled up into the slip across from us and promptly strung up a beer bong from their rigging, but they weren't too awful. They were up a little later than we were, and they were drinking, and they were a little noisy, but I had just barely begun to wonder if I was going to have to go up and go all crabby-old-fart on their youthful okoles when they turned in for the night.

All in all, though, an absolutely splendid last day in Finland, and a nice break on shore between two 40-mile-plus sails.

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Next day's plan - underway by 6 am and back across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn. Wind was forecasted to be light - we planned to sail as much as we could, but we expected some motorsailing if we were going to get back when we were supposed to. Time to give the boat back! :(

Back to the Baltic: 49'er Skiff in Helsinki Harbor

How do you say "YeeHAH!" in Finnish? :D

 Click for details - this one's nice, if I may say so myself. Although I do wish that radio tower or whatever it is wasn't quite so whatever-it-is-ish.

 Taken during our shortest sail of the entire trip - 6/20/2012, Pihlajasaari to Suomenlinna, which was just around 4 miles and took about half an hour, not counting driving around looking for a parking spot, which was frighteningly reminiscent of trying to park in Park Slope (a veddy posh neighborhood in Brooklyn where everyone has cars but no one has garages).

We'd thought about taking a more circuitous route just to make it worth raising the sails. We were glad we didn't - Suomenlinna deserved every minute we could spare!

http://www.suomenlinna.fi/en/

Grimaldo's Mile

And here's my new verse to the classic!

This summer, I've been swimming, and I might just swim some more 
Stuff my goggles cap and towel in my little swim bag and head on out the door 
Take the Q train out to Brighton Beach, and find Grimaldo's chair, 
 If it's a weekend day and you go that way, you'll find some nice folks there!

Yep, I'm not quite done with my Baltic trip reporting, but since I took a boating-safety break from that, I can't resist staying off of that topic for one more day to talk about this morning's fun, when I got up at the crack of dawn to go swim in my first swimming race since the year I joined the Sebago Canoe Club.

Photo by Rosanna Lovecchio, one of the kayak support volunteers, part of a group that came in from Jersey to help out - thanks guys, wish I'd had the energy to paddle with you after the race!

That's right - I left the boat at the club and I ran right into the water with somewhere around 200 other people for the eighth annual Grimaldo's Mile.

 The race is named after a Coney Island lifeguard who really helped out the nascent open-water swimming scene at Coney Island when the swimmers needed it - most of the other lifeguards didn't like people to swim outside the jetties that divide the beach into short segments, and would whistle them in, but he stood up for the swimmers & eventually was able to win them the right to do their long swims uninterrupted. They named their first race after him to say "Thank you" - sadly, it's now in memory of him as he passed away in 2009; what he did for CIBBOWS in some way reminds me of what John Krevey did for local paddlers, taking a sport that was considered a little out-there and giving it a chance to prove itself feasible and thrive. Click here to read a very nice tribute that was published in the Times after he passed away in 2009.

I'd actually been thinking about doing this one for a while. I finally registered maybe 3 weeks ago - I was hesitant because I actually hadn't done any serious swimming in I can't remember how long, and I wasn't sure I could still swim a whole mile, but after I got back from June's fantastic sailing adventure, I finally had a chance to go join my friends at the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers (CIBBOWS) at Grimaldo's chair for one of their 11 am weekend swim gatherings, and set out with a group that was swimming the one-mile route.

The water was still cool enough that I found myself gasping a bit and I ended up letting the group leave me behind while I swapped back & forth between backstroke & breast stroke until I had things enough under control for the crawl stroke; I still ended up doing a lot of breast & backstroke on the eastbound leg of the swim because I'm a right-side breather on the crawl & I found looking out to sea to be sort of disconcerting and I kept going all over the place; the westbound leg, I was still slow but I was able to switch to the crawl all the way, and the current was moving nicely in the right direction, and when I got back to the start I kept going and ended up doing about a mile and a half. That was good enough for me - I signed up for the race a few days later. Didn't particularly train, but there were 2 more weekends before the race & I swam on both of them - the first weekend I was recovering from a bad cold so I kept it to a mile; the second week somebody said the tide was switching at the perfect time to swim from Grimaldo's chair to the pier & have the current turning just as you got there. That's 2 miles, which was a bit of a stretch, but I decided to give it a shot, figuring I could always land & walk back if I wanted to.- One nice thing was that there was a another relatively novice swimmer who decided to try the same thing & it turned out that we swam about the same pace, so we kept each other company. I'd also sorted out a way to "spot" while doing the crawl on the eastbound leg so there was a lot less wandering all over the place.

I had total spaghetti knees at the end but I did it - so I figured I was as ready for Grimaldo's as I was going to be.

I was up at 5:30 this morning. I'd packed up a bag the night before - nice thing about packing for swimming is that there's so little to pack, I wear my suit with shorts & a t-shirt over it and all I carry is goggles, a cap, sunscreen, and a towel, plus little money. This time I added some booties & a rashguard in case I had the energy to join paddler friends who were coming from NJ to help out as kayak support and were planning a Jamaica Bay paddle afterwards, so I ended up going from a tiny swim bag to a mid-sized backpack, but still not too much & all ready to just grab off the couch. I had an orange and some leftover lamb and rice and was out the door shortly before 6 (a quick Facebook check showed that friends who were volunteering for the race had left much earlier, of course!). That was a little late but the train didn't take too long to show up, and the Q is running express to Coney Island on weekends because of track work, so I was at the Shorefront Y around 6:20 - plenty of time, registration was running from 6:15 - 7:15. I signed in, I got my official swim cap (yellow with an octopus, fun), my ankle bracelet (a timing chip - never used one of those before but it was a nice comfy neoprene strap & I almost forgot it was there), and got my number (94) written on me. That was pretty much it so I went & hung out with the paddlers until they announced that the first bus was leaving. Registration was at the finish so we could leave all our bags there; you could walk to the start if you wanted to but they had a bus, too, which I took.

Being on the first bus meant waiting for a while, so a lot of people went for a pre-race swim. I got in to see how the water was - perfect as far as I was concerned, probably getting too warm for the real polar bears (CIBBOWS people swim all winter, not just New Year's Day!). My friend from the 2-mile swim had come down at the same time, she'd swum the day before and said it was very choppy, but we had beautiful conditions for race day - temperature was supposed to go up to a beach-day-perfect 85 or so, and the water was very calm.

The beach gradually filled up with yellow-capped swimmers, and shortly after 8 am, Patricia Sener, the organizer, called us all together to give us pre-race instructions. She had a nice little chart showing the race course - it was pretty simple, one buoy at the start, another at the finish, both to be kept to port...er, on your left :D!...with the swim running parallel to the shore. Kayaks were in charge of keeping swimmers off of the jetties; jet skis were patrolling the outside boundary & could pick swimmers up if something went wrong, and then outside of the jetskis there was a perimeter of NY harbor police who were there to keep motorboats from wandering into the swim. The final set of volunteers were actually in the water with us - "angels", or buddy swimmers, these were certified lifeguards who were all highly experienced open-water swimmers - instantly identifiable by their neon-pink caps, they swam along with the pack watching for people who looked like they needed moral support (I saw a lot of them because I ended up being close to the end of the pack, which is where the people who might need encouragement are :( , but they would listen when I would say I was doing fine. I guess just being able to stop and say "No, really, I'm fine, I'm just really slow" is a good sign.

The swim start was everybody going off all at once and Patricia suggested that less experienced swimmers position themselves at the back or off to the side to avoid getting trampled - good call! Even doing that, there were still a lot of people around, and it was a challenge trying to find space. I'd really found myself enjoying the rather solitary swimming I'd been doing in the last three weeks - comfortably puttering along at my own pokey pace, looking at the spider crabs running around on the bottom, seeing the occasional other swimmer but more or less on my own with plenty of space - suddenly sharing the water with 200 other people took a little getting used to!

The other thing that made the swim much harder than I'd expected was the sun. The CIBBOWS swims on the weekends collect at 10 AM and there's usually a good bit of chitchat before the swimming actually starts, so the sun has climbed pretty high. My 2-mile swim, in fact, I was experimenting (with a fair amount of success) with using the sun as a guide on the eastbound leg - I'd figured out how to swivel my head a little further forward occasionally so I could see the Marine Park Bridge or the white building at the end of Brighton Beach & know I was going generally in the right direction; I would also throw in the occasional left-side breaths to see where I was along the route (you pass the amusement parks, then the aquarium, then when you get down to Brighton Beach you see a gazebo, and then there's a restroom, and the next gazebo after that is where Grimaldo's chair is & you're done, yay)!

With an 8 am start, though, the sun was still very low & right in the direction we were swimming (which had been determined by the current) and jeeze, between that and the slightly blurry goggles (I use a little spit to keep mine from fogging) it was impossible to see ANYTHING. I could see just enough when I would try to sight down the shore to know that I was going in more or less the right direction, but once I was past the Aquarium I couldn't see any of my further-off landmarks, and in fact as I was swimming, I might see a large dark object, but I wouldn't know whether it was a kayak, a jet ski, or a further-off police launch unless I paused to peer at it. Also seemed like the kayaks weren't always on the inside of the course where we'd been told they'd be - later on it became apparent that that was because I was so close to the end that paddlers were peeling off of their assigned spots ("just off the jetties", we'd been told) & following the race down, but at first that was very confusing. Eventually Deanna from Urban Swim (who's an excellent swimmer but also a friend from Sebago and who was doing kayak support for this one) and one of the "angels" clearly attached themselves to me, taking up positions to my right where I could see them - once I knew they were guiding me I gave up on trying to figure out where I was & just settled down to swim. A little frustrating because my "angel" was able to chat with Deanna as we moved along, and with both of them attending to me I knew I had to be pretty close to last place (and as another swimmer had said on the bus, "No matter how much you say you're just in it to finish, it's still hard to remember that when you run into the water with all those people"), but it still simplified things immensely having these 2 people right there & just not having to worry about any of the other blurs off in the glare!

Eventually I did grab a left-side breath and saw the first gazebo (phew!) and right around the same time Deanna pointed with her paddle - I paused, pulled up my goggles, and squinted & was finally able to make out the buoy. Couldn't see it at all when I put my goggles back on, but after a while I started catching glimpses.

Tried to pick up the pace - a little too soon - buoy was farther out from the beach and it was a longer swim in than I'd realized, but I did eventually see the person in front of me stand up, and a minute later I did too, and I actually managed to do a wobbly-legged run to the finish line without falling on my face. Woohoo!

Back to the Shorefront Y for the post-race food & festivities, then home. It would've been a lovely day for a paddle with my friends from Jersey, but somehow that mile swim felt a lot longer than the others I'd done & I was wiped out - but I finished, hooray!

The View From the Tugboat Bridge

Demonstrating one of the real issues kayaks pose for large commercial vessels. You do see the kayaks, right? But they look kind of miniscule, right? It's aggravating that the Chicago incident may have been misreported in a way that overblew the situation and made the outfitters in the area look far less responsible than they actually were, but the WSJ article still had points. Capt. Brucato sent this along as a demonstration on Facebook - I thought it was pretty good shot. If you're kayaking urban waterways, you should always assume you're invisible - 'cause you pretty much are.

Chicago storm incident - misreported?

I'm lifting from my own most recent status update on Facebook, so if you're FB friends with me & this looks familiar, that's why.

I'm taking a break from my Finnish fugue for this because it seems to be a rather extreme case of what happens when reporters who maybe don't know anything about boating report on a boating incident without really understanding what happened - there's more information available and I think it's worth sharing.
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Don't know if anybody else was curious about what the heck happened in that storm in Chicago, where supposedly "dozens" of kayakers had to be rescued by emergency services, but according to reporting that I found through a fellow blogger, although it was a dramatic weather event, it sounds like a lot of the drama got added in in the local news reporting of the event. The Chicago Area Sea Kayak Association has been putting up some interesting posts with the guides' version - click here to read their first post in the series.

Particulary interesting/irritating is the fact that the media version of the story led to the Wall Street Journal leading off an article with "The storm that dumped dozens of kayakers into the Chicago River this week highlights the risks posed as cities increasingly turn their rivers into urban playgrounds..." - click here to read that.

There are safety concerns, absolutely, no properly-educated paddler would deny that -- but does the Chicago story highlight those, or does the Chicago story highlight the way that sometimes papers rush to publish a dramatic story without really checking their facts?

Hard to say.

CASKA reporting found via Dave O's The Lake Is The Boss - thanks Dave!

WSJ found through Capt. Bill Brucato's NY Tugmaster's Blog - ironically, I'd gone over there to ask him if he'd seen that new Safe Harbor site that local paddler Ray Fusco had worked with the Coast Guard, the DOT, and a whole range of local professional mariners and recreational boaters to produce.

Sailing To Helsinki, A Video Post - How good was our wind?

This good! And here's a little snippet of finding our way through the beautiful maze of islands that makes up the Finnish coastline.

Blue & Green Drinks TONIGHT (Thurs Jul. 19th) plus a good reading this Saturday!

Oops! I'm so caught up in my trip reporting that I lost track of an event that happens tonight - it's time for another waterside gathering with libations of an azure hue! Green too this time - the Blue Drinks were inspired by the original Green Drinks social gatherings and this one is a twofer. I didn't think I was going to go but the project I was working on earlier in the week that kept sprouting another complication every time I thought it was done now actually seems to be done, so I may go have a beer or two - I see quite a few friends are going, should be fun.
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And then this Saturday, July 21st, there's going to be a reading and discussion from 6 - 8 pm on board the steamship Lilac, at Pier 25 in the Hudson River Park: Susan Fox Rogers, author of My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir, discusses the personal exploration and physical journey by kayak that led to her book. Co-sponsored by the New York City Watertrail Association.

I'd gone to one of her readings in Brooklyn last year, I read the book, I loved it, and the only reason that I'm not going is because I am swimming in Grimaldo's Mile on Sunday morning and it's going to be a very early start - otherwise, although I usually don't like to trek into Manhattan on weekends, I'd be there.

Baltic Adventure Part 8: Elisaari to Pihlajasaari

From my trip journal:
And the weather was GLORIOUS and we sailed almost 42 miles (45 was our estimate, it was a little shorter than that) from Elisaari to Pihlajasaari, a lovely little nature preserve/recreation island in Helsinki Harbor.

More tricky navigation through islands today, but we were OK - everything's quite well marked and as long as somebody was paying close attention to the chart, we were fine.

Nice sailing day - all downwind, mostly dead downwind, with a good breeze...

A little bit chilly, but such a pretty sail! 

 so just jib, 

although the last couple of miles, as we came in to Helsinki Harbor, we did add the main. 

Tallink Shuttle ferry leaving Helsinki for Tallinn - if anybody had been tired of sailing, this would've been where they could've skipped back to Estonia, but nobody was!

I got to drive at the beginning and the end. Setting out was beautiful - Kat planned it so that we backed out to port (the screw walked us that way plus that saved us trying to bring the bow through the wind until we had room),

driving in not so good - line to stern mooring buoy got run wrong and at one point people were asking me for forward and reverse at the same time, which didn't work so well - but everything got worked out in the end One of the straps got ripped off the lifering cover in the process, but B. spotted the strap floating by the other island (Pihlajasaari is actually 2 islands, but they're only separated by a narrow span of water and there's a footbridge connecting them), Kat retrieved it, and I had happened to bring a little sewing kit with big sail needles from my kayak repair kit and I stitched it back together with dental floss (which works well as heavy-duty thread).

B. and I went for a walk - 

we found a restaurant 

where you can get a beer on a patio overlooking the entrance to the harbor -

 I had to shoot another beer commercial (I am getting a nice collection !) -

so we were late for snacks but there was still food when we got back.

More good herring! I ate more fish on the trip than I usually eat in a month.

Another gorgeous island. At one time I guess it was more private, the place is sprinkled with lovely villas that were the summer retreats of well-to-do Helsinki residents - our restaurant was one.

here's another!

Now it's another link in this chain of lovely recreational spots which we've been enjoying so much. There is a ferry from the mainland, so people can come here for the day to hike, swim, 

play volleyball,

fish, 

birdwatch, 

or just have a beer on a patio overlooking the harbor entrance.

There are millions of boaters here - we didn't have any trouble finding a spot, but there's plenty of neighbors here in the public harbor.

including this handsome fellow with the magnificent mustachios!

Keelboats and kitesurfers, 

and  a whole assortment of dinghies - 

here are some foiling Moths ripping it up, and further off it looks like maybe an Optimist (or the local equivalent) race in progress - 

and a kayaker paddled into the cove across from where we're moored, although he beached his boat & disappeared on a hike before I could get to my camera.

Boater's heaven, here in the summertime. Think you might like to go there someday? Once again, here's the information page!