Boston Boating Blog

Paul? On a Sail Boat?

I will apologize from the start on the title of this post, for those of you wondering what will follow take your mind out of the gutter.  This past Saturday I accompanied Mike out into the harbor on his sailboat.  On the surface this subject hardly appears to be exciting enough to deserve it’s own blog post.  However when you put a Fishing Charter Captain on board who has the same tolerance for sailboats as he does for being smacked in the face with a brick it makes for an interesting day.  The weather was perfect and Mike was patient with those of us who had no idea what we were doing.  I must admit it is rather enjoyable to be on the water with no engine noise and working as a group in order to sail the boat.  A few high points of the day included Steve loosing one of the valuable tin mugs from his collection, all of us scrambling to hold on when the boat tipped in the wind, Betty Ann’s lunch which is always perfect, and Paul attempting to get Mike to cut off any other sailboat we saw.  At the end of the day when we were sitting at the dock and having a beer laughing about the day, Mike asked Paul what he though of his day under sail.  Paul looked around to make sure no one was around to hear what was about to come out of his mouth and said “you know, it was not that bad”.  I will leave you with this, the amount of days we have left to be on the water this year are slowly leaving us, take advantage of them all on whatever boat is around sail or power.

How many power boaters does it take to furl a sail?

Stardate May 16, 2009

It was time.  All good things must come to an end.  Donna J – the real thing, was in NY for an event, but I went out into the deep blue sea to watch the Volvo Ocean Racing sailboat leave Boston Harbor.  It was a foggy day as these guys headed to Ireland.  Also, the race began, which must have been planned for a year, and, while again tuned to channel 67 on the VHF, we heard the announcer say, base on the fact it was too foggy to see them, that an oil taker was coming down the middle of the harbor.  Delta Loyd and Telefonica Blue stopped racing and according to the announcer were waiting for the marshals to signal a restart.  That never happened and all the boats kept racing.  Very strange.  I figure all the Bostonian power boaters were just tired of the sailboats and just said, ‘who cares’.  Pretty poor form for Boston if you ask me.  Anywho, all the boats raced around their respective buoys an headed off to Ireland.  It was great to have you all and we look forward to your next stop here on Bean Town!

Posted by Captain Steve

BTW: If you have been following me on Twitter as Captain SteveK – I am moving to my original identity – skenniston.  I’ll be sending out a Twitter note too.