Saturday, May 19, 2012

Disjointed

Where have I been? Where am I know? Chicago, Beaumont, Chicago, Natchez, Vicksburg, Moline, Waterloo, Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay...it all kind of runs together after a while. Three hotel rooms...no four. We bailed out of a Holiday Inn express where the security system kept locking us out of our own rooms and the manager needed a master key-card to open the gym. (Which was a small room of busted up old work-out gear that was probably doing me more harm than good.) There was an extra rental car in there as well. The original one in Beaumont sounded like it was going to shed the front left wheel every time we hit the brakes or went around a right hand corner.

Milwaukee in the morning, at the lake come night fall. But even being on the boat feels a little weird. Deb is in another town waiting with Daughter Eldest for grand baby #6 to make his entrance. She left the day before I did, which was 11 days ago now. Not sure when we will be in the same town at the same time again. Somehow Kintala isn't quite Kintala with just one of us on board. The V-drive was sitting in the living room though, and with more trips next week it just didn't make sense to drive to where Deb is, spend a few hours, and drive back to St. Louis. So me, the V-drive, and Kintala are all in the same place at the same time.

I might even get some work done on it tomorrow. I didn't today. Friend Thor shanghaied me for the first race of the year the moment I got on the property. He knows I'm not a racer, but I have nearly as much sailing time on Grey Hound as he has, I can pull on a rope pretty hard when instructed, and so off we went with Kacey as another pair of racing hands. Even with me on board Thor's big Tri is too fast to not cross the line first, though I'm not sure how we did on corrected time. Someone told me the "perf" is -25. Not sure what that means, don't really care, but I suspect it means something like he has to sail twice the distance in half the time as everyone else. In any case it was 5 hours of sailing on a really nice day. (The race didn't take 5 hours. After it was over we collected the marks and then went to play for a while.)

Tonight there is a big party for new members - in fact it is in full swing even as I write. Maybe I'll join it in a little while. For now though, after seemingly endless days on the road with Deb off somewhere else, I think I'll just sit on my boat and try to figure out where I am.

3 comments:

S/V Veranda said...

You're closer to your goals than you were yesterday....

Bill K said...

If it makes you feel any better I only had one engine bringing my boat home.
I found out my high temp alarm works. :((

Bill Kelleher

TJ said...

We plug away. I think sailing is a bit like flying. Read all the books if you like, listen to all of the stories, but to be any good at it one just has to put hands on and go do it. Which is why we rarely pass up a chance to go sailing on just about anything at just about anytime, regardless of the "to do" list.

And I am hoping that a V-drive that isn't tearing itself apart, and adding the water heater to the cooling loop, will knock down the running temps on Kintala a bit. I'd like to see 175 there-abouts, not 190.