A warm, sunny summer day with number-one son, Bud, in town is an excellent excuse for some lazy time on the water - number one son being a curious blend of rabid dirt-track aficionado, consummate computer geek/gamer and professional long-haul trucker, far more at home shepherding 40 tons of freight across the North American continent, than piddling around on reality-sized sailboats...

Trying to skate out before dead low tide would imprison us in our slip, we hastily undocked Angels Wings in the usual manner, semi-rigged for day sailing -- and proceeded to idle past the other boats, except the little outboard wasn't idling! Indeed, the usually effective little motor was running wide-open and Wings was going almost nowhere, but quickly creating a haze of blue-gray 2-cycle lube... All this mechanical commotion quickly drew a skeptical look from trucker son and while the little Evinrude provided just enough oomph to get us away from the safety of our slip, but with no control once broadside to the feeble breeze wafting across Monroe Bay... a breeze that eventually snuggled us sideways against some pilings despite our best efforts to be almost anywhere else...

Something was terribly amiss - and, embarrassingly so... Enter, deliverance by jack-knife... Bud and I worked the motor out of the motor-well while Deanna held us against the pilings -- we had to laugh when we saw what used to be the prop... it was just one huge nest of barnacles and other encrusting marine life, only roughly reminiscent of a propeller shape... whew... well, now we knew the problem and, thankfully, in short order a folding knife that had spent recent years forgotten in a galley drawer dispensed with all those cavitation producing creatures...

After that little escapade, sailing in the soft zephyrs of early afternoon was anticlimactic, and eventually proved a tad boring... in time we decided to try trolling under sail. In the past I'd met with some success catching blues and mackerel, while dragging lures behind a sailboat, so I had some hope... But, No Joy! For awhile we seemed to be at the right speed for offshore saltwater fishing, but even at our dawdling pace I'm not convinced we were slow enough for the brackish-water fish of the middle Potomac... in any case, neither shiny lures nor tasty squid strips could tempt a fish hungry enough (or stupid enough) to rise to our barbed enticements and eventually Deanna retired to an empty berth for a summer catnap ...

Almost on cue, the afternoon wind piped up and over an hour or so, we went from barely any discernable wake at all to a nice boiling wake trailed behind Angels Wings. Although we were not at remotely the speeds Bud is used to at his beloved Midwestern dirt tracks, the sensation of speed is a well known intoxicant to sailors and soon had us trimming sails, "racing" after a larger boat flying a Jolly-Roger and speculating how we must have terrified the opposing skipper because of the speed with which he went hull down in front of us - this incredible sea-battle was soon captured on Bud's digital "film" from almost every reasonable angle -- with the promise that it would fuel many stories and tales back home over the coming months.

It was great fun and tacking across the Potomac we got finally curious how fast Angles Wings really was going, so we started the handheld GPS... Unless we or our GPS was hallucinating, Wings was doing nicely above theoretical hull-speed for its meager 19 foot LWL. We were seeing pretty consistently 6.8 knots; however, I finally suspected we might be getting some assistance from the river current and tide, so we reversed and sailed on a reach the other direction -- still logging around 6.4-6.5 knots... exhilarating, entertaining and pleasant... at least I figured that even though the unpainted motor lower-unit had succumbed to the marine life, Wings' hull was still reasonable clean - all in all the day provide fertile recollections for all the stories we'll embellish this winter (and a few we'll conveniently forget...).