Don't Read This

Don't you just hate it when a blogger writes one of those posts that basically says not much has happened in their life in the last few weeks or in the area of their life that their blog is about in the last few weeks, and that they are sorry that they haven't blogged much but they have been too busy, too lazy or too drunk to blog, and so there's not much to report... but then they go and write a couple of thousand words whining about life in general anyway?

I hate those posts.

This is one of those posts.

Don't read it.



So... I sailed a lot in late June, July and early August. Did a lot of regattas. Didn't win any. Not a surprise. That's OK.

The last regatta I sailed, and the last one I wrote about here was Buzzards Bay which was a light air day, a windy day, and a blown-out, rained out day.

All in all I was pretty pleased with my sailing in those six weeks or so. Apart from the day of the attack of hand cramps at the Atlantic Coast Masters I managed to complete every race at the regattas I sailed. I suffered through the frustration of long light air, shifty days and I toughed it out with the best of them on windy days, and so I am starting to believe that I may not totally have lost it, in spite of some doubts on that score after my fiasco at Hayling Island last year.

Then I kinda sorta took it easy in August as far as Laser sailing is concerned (and as far as pretty much everything else is concerned.) After traveling all over the area to sail earlier in the summer - and spending a memorable week with my grand-kids on the beach in Cape Cod - on my return to this little corner of Narragansett Bay I discovered that I really do live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I drove down to Seapowet Beach on the Sakonnet River to go for a run and was blown away by the quiet, wild charms of the middle Sakonnet. There's no place quite like it. So I went sailing by myself there the next day and soaked up the atmosphere.

The attendance at Tuesday night sailing in Bristol has been really down this year, partly because some of the key members of the fleet have been off travelling to major regattas, or off somewhere else training for major regatta, or relaxing at home recovering from sailing in major regattas. I did enjoy one evening in August of light air practice on Bristol Harbor with one other sailor. Another week the wind was flat calm on Tuesday so I went for a blast by myself in Bristol on Wednesday morning. I have been trying to drum up interest in Tuesdays in Bristol but I've been a dismal failure as a cheerleader. Excuses for not sailing with me have ranged from "I tried kite-surfing at the weekend and now I ache all over" (Duh!) to "I need to paint the house before the hurricane comes." (What difference an extra coat of paint makes when a hurricane is trying to blow your house down is beyond me.)

Ah yes, the hurricane. Irene blew through the area last weekend. Blew some boats off their moorings in Bristol. Blew over some boats on the land at the marina in Bristol. Caused a bit of flooding. Blew down lots of trees. And cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people. My wife kept saying she thought Hurricane Irene was going to be a "damp squid" (sic). It wasn't.

A damp squid. (Not Irene.)

My son and his family were some of the unlucky ones who were without power for four whole days. So they came and stayed with us, which meant that we got to look after our three little grand-kids while their parents were at work. Phew! That was harder than any of the sailing I've done this year. How do parents do it? How did we do it thirty years ago? I never realized that playing with a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old all day was so exhausting. Or so much fun.

Talking of exhaustion, I've been trying to get my half-marathon training back on schedule after slacking off a bit when I was sailing all those regattas. I tried to pick up where I had left off many weeks before. Bad idea! Attempted a 15 mile run, but could only manage 8 miles. Seems like running fitness wears off more quickly than I thought. So I scaled back my ambitions and started building up the mileage slowly again. Did a 10 mile run the next week. Then I did something totally moronic. But that's a story for another post....



You didn't really read this post did you? You can't say I didn't warn you.