I came to realization the other day that I have almost 60 hours worth of sailing footage, most of that being racing on a J/24 this winter. Unfortunately the most exciting part of watching sailing is the crashes. There's some weird thing law of the universe that states that if I'm wearing my camera there is a good chance the boat I'm on will stay upright and not collide with anything. For the most part this is a good thing cause, well, it keeps the boat upright and in hole-less. However, when I do crash I'm always pissed I don't have it on camera. However, I have had a few crashes. Nothing super-spectacular except for one race down in Shreveport, LA for the Holiday in Dixie Regatta. Halstead and I had a fairly awful weekend of racing, we only managed to finish two of the five races over the two days. I had the my GoPro on for the first day where in the first race I screwed up a gybe (I went to the low side and the boom caught me in the back) and we filled the boat with water. The second race we were on the line early and Robert ducked instead of crossing and someone was in our way so we did filled the boat again then submarined it about six minutes later. The next day we laid the boat on it's side after Robert fell out. The video of the first incident is lame, the second day incident I didn't have the camera on; however, I did have the camera on for the submarineing incident on the first day. The video is below, and it was sort of comical as you can tell by my laughing after we submarined... that was until my vest cartridge fired... which I didn't put into the video below cause there's only so much I could take. :)

I haven't posted anything from our Bimini trip, this is mainly because I've been working on a post-trip diary of sorts. It's not extremely exciting because, well, my writing sucks. Regardless, it's WAY to large to post here since it's 13 pages long. Here's an excerpt:

Our destination on that first day was Biscayne Bay. We had originally expected to head straight to Bimini, but we still had to perform the practical tests for ASA101 and ASA103. The sail from Ft Lauderdale to Biscayne Bay is (for the most part) straight south and we lucked out that day by having a 15-25 knot eastern breeze so we reached the 20 miles down to Government Cut which leads into Miami Harbor. Once we passed Fisher Island we motored along the south side of Dodge Island past a large number of docked container ships. We proceeded toward Miami proper until we were directly north of the eastern edge of Burlingame Island at which point we turned due south and headed directly for, then under, the Rickenbacker Causeway.

The wife and I took our Thistle out for a ride last week. The winds were around 7-10 as we made our way across the lake and picked up slightly once we went into the waters behind the big island. I'd never been back there before except on a power boat so I thought we'd give it a try. The wind was out of the southeast, so the waves were about a foot tall, but the sailing was fairly easy-going. Heading into the sheltered waters the wind was squirrelly due to the funneling effect of the island, and once we made it to the west end of the island we could see a perfect delineation where the calm waters behind the island met the almost-perfectly straight line, 15-17 knot winds with whitecaps every 2 feet. I was a bit nervous, I'd never had the Thistle out in such high winds. Making the transition from the calm waters to the windy waters was nerve wracking but we made it across that line without tumping. I did find that it's very hard to sail into the wind without a cunningham, and my Thistle sails significantly better on a starboard tack.

Below is a horrible diagram of the wind paths that day. Winds are out of the southeast, they diverge around each side of the eastern tip of the island; the northerly side swirls then stops while the southerly side continues on around the island and tries to meet up with the wind that should be coming around the north side of the island. The left white line is where the wind shear was the worst.

We were only on the water about an hour, the sun was going down and it was 103 degrees outside. Between the temperature and the unexpected high winds we had more than enough excitement for the evening.

It's been a couple months since I last posted anything on this site. The months leading up to that last post were fairly uneventful, but since then I've been on numerous sailing adventures, some close to home and some far away in distant lands (well, maybe not THAT far away, but farther than I've ever been.) So the question on everybody's minds is what have I been doing?

April:

14th - 15th: GMSC Spring Keelboat Regatta

27th - 29th: Holiday in Dixie Regatta in Shreveport, LA

May:

10th - 20th: Cruising from Ft Lauderdale to Miami Bay and Biscayne Bay then Bimini, south to Gun Cay, then back to Ft Lauderdale

June

16th: My wife and I took out our Thistle for the first time. I'll write another post on that as well as a list of that needs to be done to make my Thistle race-worthy.

There have been multiple days between those dates where I want sailing in one form or another.

The Past Commodore, exercise officio, was kind enough to send me picture of the June 11, 2012 storm that I endured with my brother-in-law Jay and his daughter. I wasn't aware these images existed until recently. And although they don't show me on the water, they do show the lake conditions we experienced... although they really don't do any justice to how bad it was.

And finally, here is some video up-to 30 seconds before the full force of the storm hit: