Smooth Sailing

I was thinking recently about a perfect Moth day, in the best of all possible worlds. What I came up with was get up after a good night's sleep, eat something, stumble out to laundry room en route to garage, grab coverall and don in ambulatory fashion, kick on some clogs, mix a bit of goo and glom the bottom of a hydrofoil on using obligatory "every clamp in the joint" technique, throw sailing stuff in truck, hook boat up, drive to Long Beach for a sail where there is a steady 10-15 from the southwest. Sail for a few hours, ideally in close enough proximity to other fleets of racing dinghies that they can appreciate what they are missing. Practice tacking and gybing in the flatwater lee of a long seawall all afternoon. Make progress, feel reasonably in tune with the boat, have something click in your boathandling so that gybing no longer seems impossible and is in fact borderline predictable. Go in, derig, fix a few things, change, stop by the club to snarf a few Hors d'ouerves, and drive home, stopping en route to pick up stranded, post-collegiate, cute but ditzy in that narcissistic "I'm out of college and I don't know what to do with my life, so I'm hitchhiking around the country instead of getting a job" way American hitchhiking backpackers from Mini Mart in Compton and buy diesel for $4.19 a gallon. Come home, crack the foil out of the mold, put it in a heat box with a controller to post-cure for eight hours at 135F, put some pasta on the stove, and eat it while blogging a bit about the day's events. Now what's not to like about a day like that? Sort of isolating, all this foiling, but at least I saw Charlie and Hans out on the water and had a chance to say hello. Owe Charlie a big one for reminding me to replace the tiller centering bungee I so foolishly removed at Coronado. Big mistake, that. Makes a HUGE difference coming out of the gybes.

Have to echo Mr Dubai moth guy when he says "I LOVE SAILING MOTHS". You have to earn a Moth's love, which is notoriously fickle and can waver at the slightest unexpected ferry wake. But when it's going well, it's REALLY going well. Even surfed a powerboat wake upwind for half a mile today - that was a first on foils. Just sort of bizarre to be sailing twenty yards off their stern for that long.

The sailing shoes have sailed their last. Time to bust out a new pair from the archive - too bad they no longer make the Lotus kayaking water shoe as it is possibly the greatest sailing shoe ever, apart from the Converse Chuck Taylor.

That's about it. Going back to centerline sheeting, after monkeying around with boom sheeting for months, which I adopted rather accidentally. Just better to have it somewhere predictable when everything is heading South.