Petra, Me and Sailing

The sailing vessel, Sara

Preparing to leave

Someone with a spinnaker sail

That big rotating bridge, moving just for us.

My she's happy we made it!

See, don't I look really really calm? Yeah, this was on the other side of that bridge.

Back at the slip, all relaxed, like.

All the comforts of home

Ah, yes. I believe the wine was poured by this point...

There's a lot of story to this. Oh, I wish I could just tell you all over a cuppa. Seriously funny, amazing, a little scary and yeah, amazing.

I manned the tiller and gave us direction, eventually trying to find the wind, catch the wind and still sail down the river with Petra adjusting the sails and talking non-stop about what was happening. None of it was easy, but somehow it call came back to me. The parts of me that knows about boats and hopping, yes hopping off to safely guide them into slips. I forgot what I knew.

The most amazing and no doubt stressful time for Petra was when we found ourselves on the other side of a massive steel bridge (Hey, let's just keep going to see what we see!). We get up on the bridge and see some other boats hoavering. Hell, let's just move beyond and wait a little down river until they raise that side of the bridge. Oh no! They're raising the bridge and now we're far away and look! They're moving it back again.

We have no radio. We don't know what to do. Petra pulls out the airhorn and I try and look up how many times to signal for "let up the bridge, please!" There's a wee little house actually on the bridge where there's some guy who comes out to see our little 20' Ranger sittin down there blowing our air horn for dear life, going around in circles. Next thing we know there's two speeding trains, racing across the bridge. Well heck, we think. At least there's actually trains. Maybe he really does see us. Maybe that far off signal was, Ok, don't get your panties all in a wad!

Yes, the bridge eventually rotated back to the open position. Mr Man blew his horn in a Howdy Ladies kinda way (seriously, we thought we were gonna have to lift up our shirts any minute because he didn't seem to see us batting our eyelashes) We passed through.

Ummm. I guess she needs a radio for occasions like this.
We did fine. I know I'm gonna be crazy sore tomorrow and that I've gotten myself into "something" there.