The Beautiful Spinnaker Sail!

Ode to the Spinnaker Sail that I do not have enough money to buy . . .

I wish you were Matthew Modine and I was Baby
And I owned a sewing machine in the floor….
Oh, how I would make a spinnaker.
Oh, how colorful she would be.

If anyone can get this slanted reference to a Disney movie called Wind, staring Matthew Modine and the girl called Baby in Dirty Dancing....it was basically a 13 year old girl's trashy romance about saucing sailors and a killer magnifico spinnaker.
 
At any rate, I love the Spinnaker Sail!  It is always bright and cheery and wonderful.  It fills with wind and balloons out in front of the boat.  Can I just say it again: I love spinnaker sails!!! 
 
We saw several spinnakers this weekend.  I realized today that we will probably never have one on Training Wheels.  Flying a spinnaker is for the Big League-er.  We are just not on the level.  It is best flung with the help of a crew; extra hands are needed to fly it and reel it in.

Again, I apologize for not keeping the horizon horizontal.  I need a tripod or level attached to my camera!  I took these with the 55-200 mm lens on RAW setting.

The picture quality broke down even on the RAW setting when I zoomed in to get a close up of the blue spinnaker.  I am still not sure how to best capture these distant events!

Weekend Roundup

Over the weekend, I plowed through the rest of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, because I couldn’t wait to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s eagerly anticipated sequel Committed. I was not disappointed!

I have to say that reading these two books so closely together makes an impact! The juxtaposition of the narrative voice of a submissive traditional Chinese female and the modern professional Westernized woman is quite remarkable. I cried while reading one and laughed out loud with the other.

To quote Gilbert (my hero) on the subject of the childless professional woman:

“Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, I felt at times ‘a thousand capacities’ spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, ‘I want to work!’--and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart. I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.”

What does this have to do with sailing? Absolutely nothing. Truman ran 17 miles this weekend. I ran 4. I flew to Denver for a Boston Scientific Cadaver Course on pelvic reconstruction products. I made a yummy bulgar-wild rice-cabbage-onion-herbes-de-provence-green pea salad to take to the Super Bowl Party. Packed in some dark beer. Did some No Meat Athlete Blog reading.

Absolutely fantastic! Uninterruptedly! Joyfully!
~Lauren

Neighbor "Wilson", John Denver, and the Sailing Poets

Charles Doane of WaveTrain wrote, "One thing I learned early on in my bluewater sailing career is that there are, in fact, just two sorts of bluewater sailors: there are poets, who become engineers in spite of themselves, and there are engineers, who become poets in spite of themselves."

Yesterday, we noticed that one of our dock-mates had mounted a satellite panel so that he could watch television on his boat. I remarked that that was anathema! Being on a boat on a lovely sunny day breathing the great outdoors! How could he watch television!?!! Why not read a book or write fantastic poetry?!? This is a 25' boat that sits in the marina 99% of the time! I couldn't believe it!

But, another dock neighbor, we will call "Wilson", argued that not all of us can be poets! Truman laughed. And then, almost by divine appointment, some old dude backed his truck up to the dock, sat on his truck-bed, played his guitar, and belted out some of the finest live acoustic tunes I've ever heard for the next hour. We listened to Rocky Mountain High better then John Denver delivered it, followed by James Taylor, etc.

Another marina-mate remarked, "Now there he goes messing up our peaceful solitude!"

~Lauren