A summer of sailing

 

As we were looking for summer activities for the kids sailing came up as an option.  We called North Cape Yacht club (the club closest to us that runs a Jr Sailing program) and they made it sound like an easy fun thing to do.  Little did I know what we had gotten ourselves into.  Turns out the team practices 2 days a week all summer.  Ok no problem.. But also races at least 2 days a week and we would be required to plan and host a dinner for somewhere between 20-100 sailers on 2 different nights after the club races were done.  Usually the kids races are on a Wed and Saturday.  Holly cow our entire summer was booked with sailing.  Normally not a bad thing when its me or our family sailing but this was the boy.  Well turns out he loved sailing this summer.  He had been to sail camp a few times and had pretty limited experience but was old enough to get his own boat.  So he sailed a Laser all summer and I think learned quite a bit.  Even though he had some tough days he launched for every race that the coach would let him go out in.  A few days there was a lot of wind and even some of the most experienced kids had troubles those days.  He always finished and towards the end of the season he was even moving up the rankings a bit.  I think he learned a lot and is really looking forward to coming back to it next year when we return.

Per my last post we were on our way to Put-in-Bay for Max's Jr Sailing championships.  For an entire week the kids get the run of the island during the evenings and get to sail all day.  How cool is that.  We grabbed a mooring ball and settled in for the week.  This was my first time attempting to grab a ball with this boat.  Annabelle got on the swim platform and grabbed the first ball we found.  In retrospect this was a bad idea as we had two nights of storms and were quite uncomfortable on the boat.  If we had grabbed one closer to Gibraltar Island it still would have been uncomfortable but I probably would not have woken up floating in the air nearly as much.

Anyway it was a good week and we figured out our propane was not working correctly and that having a generator was fantastic!  No more power worries and if we wanted to run AC at night before quite hours we could be quite comfortable while also keeping our batteries topped up!  I'm a big fan of the generator right now.  

While Max was certainly not winning any races he certainly had a really positive experience at the event and is looking forward to going again next year.  Heck why not its pretty much a week long summer camp with well over 100 kids, they get to sail every day, ride go carts at night, get to stay at the hotel and have very little parent involvement.  Pretty much like summer camp.