Passagrille Sunset, St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA.
November 25, 2005
2005.11.27
It has been a busy month - spent ten days in Phoenix attending an Oracle Application Server 10g training course and visiting with my mom and dad at their home in Sun City. Got in three rounds of golf with my mom. She's getting good - gives the ball a good smack down the middle of the fairway and her chipping and putting are nothing to sneeze at. Me? My usual moments of brillance (even par through the first seven holes one day) tempered by complete and utter disaster (two drives in a row snap-hooked out of bounds - you'd think I'd learn). The weather was gorgeous and it was nice seeing big skies and mountains on the horizons again.
Last Thursday (Thanksgiving for the rest of you), Gina and I drove to St. Petersburg to scope out the area for Gina's upcoming move to Tampa next January. We stayed at a co-op in Passagrille, on St. Pete Beach which is on the southern-most tip of a westward barrier island. Tampa and St. Pete are nice, lots to do, and as you can see above the sunsets are pretty nice too. I shot that from the patio of the apartment we rented for the weekend.
I took the boat out for a very quick run with the iron sail to test out a new display unit I bought on ebay for the depth finder. Unfortunately it doesn't work. Well, the display unit works, but I'm not getting a good signal from the in-hull transducer. Whoever installed it jury-rigged it and I couldn't figure it out. I also discovered that breaking the seal around an instrument mounted through the cockpit wall is not a good thing unless you're ready to seal it again right away. When I was fooling around with the display unit last week I broke the silcone sealant around it's mounting plate. It's rained a couple of times since then and water found it's way into the cabin, down the wall, and into the starboard settee cushion, which is currently drying out in the garage. Lots of old mildew from previous soakings - hope I can get it cleaned up, but I think I'll be buying new cushions some time in the near future.
Jibe Talking, FWYC Brinckmann Regatta, Choctawhatchee Bay, Florida, USA.
November 5, 2005
2005.11.07
Crewed on Breakaway last Saturday for the Fort Walton Yacht Club's annual Brinckmann Regatta. The rules required a woman at the helm for the duration of the race and Jennifer Grant did a great job as usual. We finished third overall, beating arch-rival Ambush. Jibe Talking, the J/27 pictured above, came in second, beating us on corrected time. It was a great sunny day, with steady 15 knot winds for most of the race and temperatures in the low 80s. Shorts and t-shirts in November - gotta love it!
