Century Club: Sage Leone

Two epic water sports today!

In the morning, I went with Raiden to Lavender Lineup, a surfing community to expand access to LGBTQ+ and BIPOC surfers. A little cheating since I am in neither community, but I drove Raiden, who is! It was an absolute BLAST. Waves were about 2 feet high, I was on a soft-top longboard, and I was catching waves left and right. The leaders were around giving people tips, and I have learned that I 1. paddle too early, and 2. popup WAY too late. About 1.5/2 hours surfing in a wetsuit, and by the time I got out I still had ice cubes for toes, but it was beach day weather, so I warmed up pretty fast.

Then, I booked it home to hop on Pinchy for an adventure to Peddocks. They were planning to spend the night (along with the other Savin Hill fams and their kiddos), but Kathy and Rick on Muddler were coming back at night. It was a beautiful warm day to hang out on the beach, get a final harbor swim in, and sit by a bonfire, then a full moon to light our way home!

Today was Madi and finally a day with some wind. This has been the calmest fall I've ever encountered. Once again flew a spin, cause she also just took the class, but more fun today was just zipping around. Madi doesn't like to get her butt out there or roll tho, so some room for improvement for sure. 

I bailed on MOW today, since Grace was supposed to be in town, but then she bailed on me, so I headed out to CBI. Sailed my first tiller club race and had an awesome time. By far the most active I have ever been on a Mercury. We were hiking and rolltacking and really doing our best to sail good and fast. Three great finishes (2, 4, 2) and then we must have started getting tired, cause we fell apart. A few penalty spins, and the last three races were back of the pack for us.

THEN, there was a spinnaker class that had an open spot, and I hopped in there. The wind (of course) picked up, so we ended up out there on a relatively wild yellow, river full of boats, tossing spinnakers up in the air for the first time. Meg and I got star of class :). It was SO much fun, and I don't think I got any better at trim, but I loved getting more time to feel it all. Driving was neat, too!

Then I went home and laid horizontal after a full 7 hours out on the water.

As a memorial to Ed Long, the person who used to run Friday night casual racing, every year CBI hosts a Friday night "un-regatta" where the courses are wacky and the sailing is a mess. This was my first Ed Long, and it was a beautiful day for it. The courses were a warm-up W4 (sailed as per usual), a W2 Haiku race (write a Haiku between the start and finish, not done until it is turned in at the RC), a "backwards" race (which does not mean sail backwards, as we all thought, instead means start downwind, roundings to starboard), and the CBI 500 (a figure 8 where you collect a washer that gives bonus points at the RC boat each lap). As I'm sure they predicted, anytime we were required to gather at the RC resulted in an absurd amount of bumper boat, and the backwards race's leeward mark was a similar pileup (I think the start also had some issues, aka almost the whole fleet was over the line before go). We collected a special washer that won us a CBI pint glass, but certainly were far from the top of the rankings.