Happy Birthday to Me

I turned 56 this week and it occurred to me for the very brief few minutes that I actually thought about it, that I'm older than my boat and I have about as many systems failures as it does. So I decided to go a little easy on her.  Must have helped, because we celebrated this weekend with an absolutely perfect sail. We took off mid-afternoon with very little fanfare since most of The Assembled hadn't manage to assemble at the clubhouse yet. A good thing, this, as I still fully expected something to break (see The Other Shoe post...) and wanted to spare us the grief of hopeful onlookers. But nothing did. We motored quietly and smoothly out of the marina, put up our reacher and mainsail, and proceeded on a beautiful beam reach down the lake toward the dam in 8kts of wind, as forecasted. The reacher is perfect for that kind of wind. Unfortunately it's not so perfect for 21 apparent, which is what the wind quickly built to. We rolled a good bit of it in and had a wonderful romp down the lake at 20° to the dam, post haste. We sailed back towards Coles Creek, our destination for the night, at which point the beam reach wind became on-the-nose wind. It took us as long to get into Coles Creek at 8 tacks than it took to sail all the way to the dam and back. We were determined to sail onto the anchor, though, a skill we practice every chance we get. Determination paid off and and hour and a half later we dropped the hook, backed down on it and pronounced us home, 251 days after the day we'd left there last. We had a refreshing swim in the cool water, a great dinner of steak fajitas, a beautiful sunset and a fabulous night's sleep in the breeze through the hatch.

A typical Cole's Creek sunset

After breakfast of bacon and eggs we headed back so Tim could make a flight Sunday. This time we put up the staysail on the cutter rig, sailed off the anchor, and with the small staysail and the main we were still doing 5.5kts. It was a spectacular weekend and a memorable birthday.