Vir-GO!

Well well well, thirty years gone by. Whattayaknow? Lots of friends are turning 30 this year and I seem to be hearing the same question from many of them, "What would your twenty year old self say to your thirty year old self?". A common answer has been something along the lines of, "calm down, take a break, take it easy". This certainly rings true for me as well. On the other hand, I also heard myself telling me to buy a new truck and then go sailing for a month. And who am I to argue with myself?

I left Bend, I dunno, sometime a little over a week ago. I high tailed it to Bellingham, WA, and stayed the night with a good friend, his children, and his very pregnant wife. The next morning I woke early, had a cup of matte with the two of them and then hopped on a ferry to Friday Harbor where I met up with the ship and crew of the Adventuress and spent the next three days onboard. It turned out to be one of the best trips I have had on board the A. Seriously had a laugh a minute, and the winds were great. On the last day we reefed the main, didn't even raise the fore, and had full headsails. I think we hit nine knots, which on the A, feels great!

But I had to get back to B-ham to catch the Zodiac, and I am here now for the rest of them month.
We just got back from a three day trip with the faculty of Evergreen State College. Great folks, and I learned that I can always sound smarter if I preface everything I say with some sort of historical connotation. "Ya know, originally in the 1700's....(yadda yadda yadda).....

The first day of this trip was my birthday. If you know me, or my immediate family, you know that birthdays are not usually a big deal. But for some reason I found a particular solace on the 30th of this August. We were at anchor in once of my favorite places in the San Juans, Sucia Island. There was a bucket of oysters hanging over the starboard side and I dipped into them freely throughout the day. That really is all I have to say about that.

We returned to B-ham this afternoon. After post trip cleaning was done (kinda), I unloaded my motorcycle from the truck and took a little drive around Fairhaven and Bellingham. Then I came back to the ship and and cooked up a few freshly caught dungeness crab on deck.

Ahhhh...the life of a crabber