It was a memorable season and this was the high point.
Sailing to Cape Cod on CHRISTMAS is a family tradition. We've made the trip several times over 20 years and each loop, down and back, has been a unique memory for our family.
Our daughter and my sister in law, both living in Brooklyn NY these days, helped me sail from Maine to Buzzards Bay. Here are a few pics, mostly taken through the eye of my daughter.
She now works in Manhattan in a high stress industry managing projects for a biz out of Delaware. Sailing memories are shared in a family but uniquely our own as well.
Selfie: Mornings in Maine and on the GOM, are often windless. She has spent countless hours, in this very spot.
Wind comes. It's refreshing and smells good. The motion of a familiar boat getting up to a comfortable speed is exhilarating. It's good to see your adult kids unwind where they are most comfortable.
Miles go by, I get put in the lens.
Thanks to her mom, food, like sailing, is life to us. I have memories (and photos) of her cooking below, just managing to reach the galley counter.
She can prepare dinner on a sailboat underway, and hold it to the seaway. A learned skill.
This one is a prize for me. I'm used to spending the night navigating and keeping watch as a family sleeps below. This trip, I was asleep below when she took this screen shot on her phone, at 2:12 AM. You know of course, she is the reason I could fall asleep, below. She knows where she's going.
The farther from home I go, the less I sail. It's just a given: The wind on the coast isn't the most reliable for those of us that want to get somewhere in a reasonable time frame. This crossing, we sailed half our miles. That's above average in our experience.
But it is the sailing that I remember, we hardly touched the wheel through the entire sail. All afternoon, CHRISTMAS treated us to low but satisfying speeds in light Southerly winds, carving a track through the glassy water ahead.
As night fell and the Southerly grew, speed increased as did the sea, yet our motion was lovely through this night. Old boats don't point as high as new, but our best sails across the GOM have been to windward. Go figure.
Maybe it's the package of an old boat, she squeaks below going to windward, yet the miles seemed endless that night across the Gulf of Maine. Like a train ride.
Sailing to Cape Cod on CHRISTMAS is a family tradition. We've made the trip several times over 20 years and each loop, down and back, has been a unique memory for our family.
Our daughter and my sister in law, both living in Brooklyn NY these days, helped me sail from Maine to Buzzards Bay. Here are a few pics, mostly taken through the eye of my daughter.
She now works in Manhattan in a high stress industry managing projects for a biz out of Delaware. Sailing memories are shared in a family but uniquely our own as well.
Selfie: Mornings in Maine and on the GOM, are often windless. She has spent countless hours, in this very spot.
Wind comes. It's refreshing and smells good. The motion of a familiar boat getting up to a comfortable speed is exhilarating. It's good to see your adult kids unwind where they are most comfortable.
Miles go by, I get put in the lens.
Thanks to her mom, food, like sailing, is life to us. I have memories (and photos) of her cooking below, just managing to reach the galley counter.
She can prepare dinner on a sailboat underway, and hold it to the seaway. A learned skill.
This one is a prize for me. I'm used to spending the night navigating and keeping watch as a family sleeps below. This trip, I was asleep below when she took this screen shot on her phone, at 2:12 AM. You know of course, she is the reason I could fall asleep, below. She knows where she's going.
The farther from home I go, the less I sail. It's just a given: The wind on the coast isn't the most reliable for those of us that want to get somewhere in a reasonable time frame. This crossing, we sailed half our miles. That's above average in our experience.
But it is the sailing that I remember, we hardly touched the wheel through the entire sail. All afternoon, CHRISTMAS treated us to low but satisfying speeds in light Southerly winds, carving a track through the glassy water ahead.
As night fell and the Southerly grew, speed increased as did the sea, yet our motion was lovely through this night. Old boats don't point as high as new, but our best sails across the GOM have been to windward. Go figure.
Maybe it's the package of an old boat, she squeaks below going to windward, yet the miles seemed endless that night across the Gulf of Maine. Like a train ride.
