We wanted to sort out the spinnaker gear, and get another sailing practice in, before "Race Your House". We did get some gear sorted, but the 19 kts, turned out to be a bit over 30. Course we had full sails up by then and tested the crew's fun meter. What a fine fun crew, look at all the grins! All good, even at 40 degres of heal a few times - well we did toss the boat a bit. Pat carefully folded up his bed, so he wouldn't have to share the forward head, and the rest of our gear floated and tumbled across the floor as usual. Sure was good to be on such a nice big strong boat! With two reefs and just the staysail, the wind backed off a bit, so we put he genoa back out, and Karl did a fine job driving us downwind, tricky with the big main, even reefed. He may have had the max speed of 8.5 or more. North of Edmonds, almost to Whidbey Island it was time to turn around. The apparent wind was much higher, and "Is the genoa suppose to be in the water"? Ok, back to the staysail, which makes tacking easy, and I even got to drive a little. Pat's lounging again, no just sorting out the blocks. The wave through the glass head portlight shows a bit of the variety of conditions we had, and looking at the boat speed vs SOG, speed over ground, you can see we had a over a knot of current, coming home. We made it back to Shilshole at dusk, just as it was starting to rain - what a fine time on the water. Thanks All!     Please enjoy these shared snapshots - these pics are good therapy for me.
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