04/12/2010

We went sailing with our crew, Keith and Ben, and Julia came too. The wind started off pretty light, but then it picked up to around 14 knots. We sailed windward-leewards, and we put the spinnaker up six times, and practiced rounding marks. When we got home I ate a whole entire pizza. Dad and I went swimming in the swimming pool and we did races. I beat daddy every single time (on corrected time!)

Comments [0]

04/11/2010

After a week of relaxing, fishing and catching all kinds of things that live in the sea, we are now switching to race mode. Peter is taking over blog duty:

We had a great sail to our condo. I liked that we didn't heel too much, and we put up the spinnaker. We had a nice reach to the condo. And there we went for a swim in the pool.

Comments [2]

04/08/2010

I caught a brand new turtle that was only like one month old. When I first saw the title I thought it was a plastic toy turtle. But when I caught him he was moving and tried to swim though the net. He had cool designs on his shell and he was very little. His name is Turtle. After daddy took some pictures we let him go.

Comments [2]

04/05/2010

Yesterday morning I caught some hermit crabs at the beach. I put them in a bucket and we took them sailing. I think the crabs enjoyed sailing. Later we went to the airport and met Mama and Peter. And then we had dinner and I had crab legs, steamed and dipped in butter.

This morning we sailed to the beach where I caught the crabs, and then we let them go. We fed them squid, which we got for bait.

Comments [0]

04/03/2010

it took a long time to get boat ready, and I wanted to go to the beach. At last we were ready, and we set off. I steered the boat...

Just now we caught a fish! We left a fishing rod, with a piece of hot dog on the hook in the water. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of writing the blog, we heard the rod rattling. Daddy wound it in. It was a catfish! We wanted to let it go, but it had swallowed the hook. Dad tried to kill it, but it had a hard skeleton on it's head. I was exited but I was also scared.

Comments [4]

04/03/2010

Danny writes: Before this trip I was not looking forwards to it. But daddy let me sit in the front seat. I never ride in the front seat. I could adjust my seat and push buttons on the dash board. Daddy made me a special foot-rest. The most fun thing was sticking my hand out the window and feeling the wind.

Comments [0]

04/01/2010

We are on our way south for some cruising and racing in Fort Walton Beach, FL. This time Danny is my co-pilot, and he will be writing the blog.

Danny writes: we are at Columbus, OH, and it is very hot. I have been making monster out of pipe cleaners, with googly eyes. There is a lot of trucks on the highway. I have been having fun so far.

Comments [4]

01/23/2010

This year, Tom asked me to take the role of tactician on board Flight Simulator. I accepted with some trepidation, as I have never had to call tactics before on a windward-leeward course, and I knew we would be up against some very good sailors.

Sure enough, conditions on Monday were very shifty, with a 10 knot northerly breeze that was veering all over the compass. It seemed that every time we tacked on a 10 degree shift, we ended up on the wrong side of a 30 degree shift. It was a disaster! I just had no clue which way the wind would go next.

Talking it over with the team that evening, we determined we had to stay close to the competition and not try to play those shifts. That worked better, but we found the boat was not moving with speed over the competition. Even the smaller sprint 750s seemed to be pulling away from us in the lighter wind conditions.

It was not till Thursday that stronger southeasterly winds arrived and we got the boat moving up to our usual pace. With wind in the high teens and good size waves we enjoyed the conditions more like those of past years, and finishes in the front of the fleet.

Friday brought more light winds, but buoyed with the previous days success, we fought our way to the front again.

Overall our standing was fourth, but we missed beating the third place boat by just 9 seconds. And all the boats above us were professionally crewed.

I always learn a lot from sailing with Tom on Flight Simulator. This week I learned what it takes to claw our way back from a miserable first couple of days. We maintained good moral, and everyone on the team was working together to solve the problems and go back out there and do the best we could do. I am very lucky to be part of this team.

Comments [0]