Taladros

Today, Monday, marks the tenth or maybe eleventh day we have been at Minorca Sailing.

The days are starting to blend together in my memory in a pleasant haze. Memories of sunny days on the water, leisurely lunches in the sunshine on the hotel patio, and evening strolls to local restaurants. I can't remember any more what happened what day, or even what day it is. Weekends lose their meaning when every day is like a weekend.

The last few days have brought mainly lightish winds of Force 1 to 3, with plenty of sun. We have had sailing classes every morning and Laser races every afternoon and sometimes video debriefs in the evening too.

I think we worked on upwind sailing and downwind sailing and tacks and gybes in the classes, but we have also done other stuff. We've done drills and drills and more drills. My head is spinning trying to remember all the drills.

I finally discovered how to do roll tacks in very light winds. I've been struggling with this for years. Every coach and every book seems to teach it a slightly different way and none of them seemed to be working for me. But the method demonstrated by our instructor this week did work for me and all of a sudden I can do (totally illegal) extreme roll tacks in hardly any wind that can accelerate the boat to an alarming speed coming out of the tack. Woo hoo!

I have also learned the totally useless skill of how to tack a Laser by walking around the back of the boom. Quite spectacular and very silly.

I have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in one Laser race by failing to predict how an RS100 would gybe and round the last leeward mark of the race in front of me, thereby getting trapped outside him as he soooo sloooooowly picked up speed after his gybe and then got trapped below him as my Laser opponent came round the mark behind the RS100, tacked immediately for the finish line and beat me by many boat-lengths. Duh! Sometimes I am so dumb. (The asymmetrics start separately from us and and are scored separately but race around the same buoys.)

And I made a miraculous comeback from deep in the fleet in another race when the wind died and I stole an inside overlap at a gybe mark thereby putting myself on the left of my fellow Laserites when the wind eventually filled in from the left and I was the the first to get over into the new wind and lead the fleet around the leeward mark and to the finish. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

I think I could bear to live this kind of life indefinitely.

Do we really have to go home on Friday?