Saturday, May 2, 2009

Big winds to no winds

I am sitting in the cabin of Nomad as she sits utterly motionless in her slip. Eric Clapton is playing on the CD. Deb is crashed in the V-birth. She was reading up on Catamaran sailing but I think the long day of working on the boat has caught up with her and she has drifted off to sleep.

We got all set to do a little sailing this morning but the flags were hanging limp and the lake appeared to be glass smooth with just a few patches of cat's paws ruffling the surface here and there. Since there was teak yet to varnish, a water system yet to clean out, and a couple of other boat items to finish, it seemed best to stay in the slip and get a little work done. That turned out to be a good call. Friend Thor and his crew left the slip this morning on the fastest boat in the marina. Late in the afternoon they drifted back in having taken more than 3 hours to cover about 4 miles; this in all up racing trimaran that can often do better than wind speed! Even flying our drifter little Nomad would have been drifting aimlessly at the mercy of the occasional zephyrs and oddball lake currents.

Fortunately the next best thing to sailing the boat is working on her, keeping our little floating cabin as close to perfect as we can. I may never have the skill to have the "best sailed" boat on the lake, but after years of fixing things I can strive to have the "best maintained" boat. With a little luck (i.e. wind) we can go out tomorrow and practice that sailing part.

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