I'm Back

I'm back from a 10 day adventure to the wilds of Vancouver, BC and Whidbey Island Race Week. I had hoped to write a post or two while I was gone, but I was too busy having fun to mess with crappy internet connections. In fact, I didn't even get a chance to do my normal net-surfing and keeping up with the news. It's probably one of the longest stretches I've had in not having any clue what was going on in the world. A quick scan of the news when I got back indicated that I hadn't missed much. The war in Iraq continues, the stock market is crashing, Gonzales is lying, Hillary and Barack are taking swipes at each other, blah, blah, blah. Maybe I've been taking too much interest in stuff that really isn't all that interesting.

Granville Island is interesting. I thought I had been there before, but I was mistaken. It was all new and exciting to me. There are lots of shops and restaurants, but it's not all touristy retail stuff. There's a boat yard there, working marinas and even a microbrewery. It's a great place to moor a boat in the heart of a great city.

Here's the main drag on Granville Island. A shot from above would have given a better feel, but oh well. You'll have to go visit yourself.

Here's a view of downtown Vancouver from the island.

I really liked these cool water taxis. It made it really easy and fun to get across False Creek to downtown Vancouver and back again. John and I used them to get to downtown to get my passport and then we even got some culture and went to the Vancouver Art Museum to see their Monet to Dali exhibit. After Lorraine finished working for the day, we all met to see Michael Moore's film SiCKO (that could be the subject of a whole blog entry itself. I liked it a lot) and then had a dinner of fine Indian cuisine.

While there, I took a Hanse 400e sailboat for a test run. (This is the boat I plan to buy if I sell WaveGuide.) There wasn't much wind, but I got to try out the self-tacking jib and spend a leisurely couple of hours sailing around English Bay. Tom and Nancy came up for the day to check out the boat and ended up spending the night. We went to a pretty classy Italian restaurant and had to suppress our giggles when our lovely, but obviously new waitress couldn't get our bottle of wine open. She declined our offer of help, left the table for a minute and came back with it magically opened. I had the risotto, which was good,but not nearly as good as Bonnie's. A good time was had by all.

And here we are at Race Week. I didn't have much of a chance to take many pictures, but it was quite a sight to see almost 100 sailboats at one time. This racing business is hard work. My body took more of a beating after nine races in four days than it has in a long time.

Some of the crew relaxing on Surt between races.

I think I set a bunch of new records for the number of people on my boat. At one point, there were about 20 on board! Here some of us are camped out on Pam's bed (formerly the pilothouse table).

The races themselves were quite a battle. Here are the results http://cycseattle.org/2007_specific/wirw.php

Surt (named after a Norse god of some sort) is in Fleet P6. As you can see, it was a heart-breaking battle for last place in our group. Even though we beat our competition in the last three races, the best we could do was tie for last, or tied for 8th, as I prefer to say. We did however, manage to win the award on the first day for innovative sailing techniques. We crossed the finish line in the first race with about 3/4 of our spinnaker still flying. That would have been OK, except the last leg was to windward! (For all you landlubbers out there, spinnakers are the big colorful sails that get flown on downwind legs. After we rounded the last downwind mark, we got the spinnaker all snarled in the jib furler, and couldn't bring it down all the way.) Since I was running the foredeck, this was my bad:-( I didn't make that same mistake again, but instead found new ones to make. If nothing else, we kept the rest of the fleet well entertained.

Special thanks to Mike Sinclair, owner of Surt, for allowing a bunch of rookies like me on board. If he'll have me back, this will be an annual event for me.

This trip was fabulous in more ways than one. Even though I resolved when I started this blog not to mention my love life, I've been so smitten by Bonnie that I can't help myself. There, now the whole world knows.