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Na na... R didn't get to race today but I did. Got up at 6am (ouch), rode over the Antioch bridge, hopped Amtrak, showed up very early to monthly Open House day where Cal Sailing Club takes the general public on little sails, just one lap through the "south sailing basin" per people load, forgot that Sun morning was also a club race day, so hopped in a boat, traded off skipper, and did horribly. When to tack to make it just upwind of a windward mark has become badly uncalibrated. Then had about five boatloads of people, all one parent with kids except for a happy young couple. I'm definitely rusty. Then on Amtrak and over the bridge again. Other volunteers made burritos for lunch with roasted peppers and other goodies on the side, then chicken and veg tikka marsala for dinner with salad and a bunch of other goodies. Total time in transit was about 5.5 hours, 2 hours of that on the train. Best I've eaten in a while now. So, finally got to see those peeps, or a lot of them. Wind was good. The kids all enjoyed surfing down the waves on the last leg of the little tour, a downwind run back to the dock. After grinding on work for a few weeks here, I was probably a bit excessively excited to gab with human beings. Got some reading done on the train but coursework for this week is at 0% right now. Pooped (in the non-nautical sense).

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Addendum to yesterday... I think I have a pretty solid tour guide routine for these public sails. There are some factoids that people seem to love. Part of the trip is oohing and aahing at the view (yesterday, a fleet of about 30 keelboats probably from Berkeley Yacht Club beercan races) was out, in the distance, and all flying spinnakers on the downwind run. I don't talk over that but just let them enjoy.

But people invariably have some questions for part of the trip, and the kids have constant questions they struggle to listen to any answer to unless it's super, super brief. R is good at this, I'm not. Part of my random littering of factoids is that the yarn on the shrouds tells us which way the wind is going, but by moving, we create our own wind too, so that's not the same wind as if we were sitting still, and, oh, hey, look, it's coming from under the Golden Gate Bridge, and there it is, and now we're sailing in to the wind a bit but we can't sail straight in to it, so if we wanted to go to the Golden Gate, we'd have to turn back and forth through the wind to get there, and we're going to do just one of those turns, and it's a called a "tack", but I'll let you know before we do that. It's always the kids that ask how we can sail in to the wind (adults probably know it's a boring monologue), and I have not figured out how to condense "sails have aerodynamic lift like an airplane and we use some the speed we built up from sailing sideways to the wind from the sail to take off like an airplane" in to the three words kids have attention for. Maybe "because we're going fast enough!" will work.

Other standard questions adults always ask: how long have you been sailing, what's the furthest you've sailed, questions about the club keelboats (which were also out) (people love learning that there's more than a ton of lead in a keel sticking 3 feet out of the bottom of the boat), have I ever capsized/do the dinghies ever capsize (yes, lots, but we sail with less sail up (pointing to the furled jib and rolled up reef in the main, tho I did use the jib on a few trips to get out of the sheltered area at more than a crawl), and I'm sailing gently today, but see that float on top of the mast? that keeps us from going totally upside down if we capsize, and teaching here a lot, new sailors often capsize), how deep the water is (fun stories there, including Ashby Shoal breakfasts). Asking the crews how wet they want to get the parents have a "I hope he's joking" look, and the kids argue between "wet!!" and "no!!" and always settle on "a little wet" which means I can keep spray to a minimum without worrying about working too hard to dodge waves, and it's just enough excitement. Logs rides have nothing on our little plastic boats.