Addicted to Sailing

Sailing this past Sunday couldn't have been better. Most of the cloud cover from Saturday has gone away, but the fresh breeze hasn't, so it made for quite the agreeable sailing outing. Normally in Seattle, you either have clear skies or you have wind, but this weekend we managed to have both.  

Next weekend, the class is taking the three WYC keelboats and two other associate members' boats and sailing from the university to Kingston, where we'll spend the night before heading back. I'm looking forward to that, since I'll be crewing on Perspicacious, the Head Fleet Captain's San Juan 28.  He's a bubbly character from Australia and the club's doyen of sailboat repair, so this is bound to be both entertaining and educational for me.  Unfortunately for us, however, the sunny weather we're having now is predicted to disappear by the weekend, but we'll muddle through somehow.

I was appointed Performance Fleet Captain last Friday, meaning that I'll be in charge of maintaining the club's high-performance dinghies. The Double-Handed Fleet Captaincy was already spoken for, so the club's commodore dragooned me into being the filling the vacant Performance Fleet position. It's supposed to be a rather big deal, but I can't help but be wary of a job that absolutely no one else seems to want to do. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, as they say.

The Camp Parsons work party is still two weeks away, and I have lots of graduate school work to do between now and then, but I nevertheless catch myself constantly thinking about the Camp Parsons sailboats.  This is mostly because I keep learning so many new things about fiberglass and sail repair at the weekly WYC volunteer work parties, and I can't wait to apply them to the camp's boats, some of which are badly in need of a fixing up.

The sailing class I'm helping to teach is hobbling along. The weather has been uncooperative, to say the least.  It has vacillated between being either way too strong for beginners or completely nonexistent altogether.  Also, because sailing involves so much complex detail, I'm tempted to try to explain it all at once, but I try not to skirt the edge of pedantry. It's much better to let them figure out the nitty-gritty fine points on their own. It'll all come to them in the fulness of time, if they're committed enough to learn, but at this early stage, it's just too much to process. In any event, I hope this will all be good experience for teaching sailing at Camp Parsons.  A Boy Scout, I find, is smarter than your average college student, so it should be easier going.