from Michael Wagner

While none of us are very happy when the Northeast river is windless, I get equally grumpy when it blows from the East. With a fixed geography oriented North/South, its always a challenge to pick a course, and you are never sure how long what little wind there is will last, and I guessed wrong last night. But like I’ve been saying all Summer, its always better to be out on the water on Thursday night than running the risk of falling off the couch at home.

If I didn’t know better, it would be easy to imagine Ron and Justine Roecker have some type of silent running stealth engine running under Swan. As the rest of us are creeping along towards the start line of our race, here they come, cutting thru the rest of the fleet like a hot knife to butter. And with the highest handicap number in the fleet, we all need to be significantly ahead of Swan to be considered doing well, so its bad news when Ron and Justine are nipping at your heels. For the entire first leg of our course, we just couldn’t shake them, and neither could anyone else. Morning Star and Solaris finally made a little distance by the time we reached the first mark, and Victoria, La Perla Azul, Whimsey and Swan all rounded shortly behind with just seconds between them. The positions seemed to trade back and forth several times on the next 2 legs, but it appeared that the Northeast river’s version of the Bermuda Triangle swallowed a few of the boats while heading back to our next mark because they just disappeared for a while. Then we heard a hail on the radio from Swan stating that they were “retiring”. For those who don’t know, that’s polite Justinespeak for “I think I’ve had enough of this, Ron is hungry, and we go to bed early and don’t want to be out here all night”. The Ronalds on La Perla Azul and Wilson King on Victoria caught the translation quickly and caved in too. Of course, the announcements from shore that everyone’s restaurant orders were flying out of the kitchen didn’t help either, so the evening’s end was rather anticlimactic. At least we didn’t get rained on or blasted by 35 knot winds.

We also had a nice sized group of Junior sailors out on Optis and Lasers. They’ve all said they will keep coming on Thursdays until school starts, and encourage others to come out and join them for the next few weeks