With Sheryl working on a family project, Mike arranged crew for the "super-serious" Puget Sound Cruising Club Tequila Race; Kitty, Mark, Laticha, & me. This time he would fly his spinnaker! The only boat we saw at the start was Rob and Teresa's Baba 40, s/v Yohelah. Of course, it was a "Noserly", wind from the South, so upwind till we rounded Blake Island. We traded a couple tacks with Yohelah, but lost them in Elliot Bay. In the light air Southwest of Blakely, we launched the chute. The sock went up, and down into the water when the halyard broke! Oops! We fished it out, relaunched on a jib halyard and quickly sailed North of Restoration Point. We did a controlled take-down, spotted Doug's C&C LF 39 and rafted up. Pretty gracious, Doug was anchored with his powerboat friends from Port Orchard, and left his burgee out! Ha! Soon boats were rafting with anchors in both directions, and Mike was wrangling cats like Steve. Good job Mike! We had a lot of good food spread out on Yohelah, and Greg on Bardo poured Tequila for all willing adults. Puget Sounder arrived at dusk, to make eleven boats at the raft-up. Yea!

Sunday morning we had a shared breakfast on Raven Dancer, and a sweet sail home, with four or five spinnaker jibes to Shilshole. What a fun trip! If you missed this one, I hope you can make the next raft-up. Thanks all!

(Click on a image below for a larger image "slide show" - arrow keys work well.)