I know everybody’s out there enjoying the holiday weekend. 🙂

I went sailing again. Not racing this time, just a nice, relaxing cruise. I went out with the Sail La Vie meetup group. We went sailing for the day and then came back to join a BBQ party in progress on the dock.

Things didn’t start out too well. It was pouring buckets on the drive up to Kemah! I had to slow down to 30 mph a couple of times, just to see where I was going. It was still raining when I got to the dock, but just a light rain so it wasn’t too bad to unload the truck and get down the dock to the boat.

We had a full crew for the Paradise,13 including Capt Kent. Everyone was in good spirits, even if they were all wet. The mimosas helped quite a bit. 🙂  No fair weather sailors in this crew! We checked the weather online and saw there was a pretty big squall line right over us. We decided to wait out the rain in the cabin before leaving the dock.

hoping for the rain to stop and the wind to start

We got underway and headed out into the bay. Capt Kent brought along his dingy. The plan was to sail for a while and then take the dingy in for lunch. Once we got out of the channel, we put up the mainsail and found out there was no wind. 🙁

The weather was still against us, so we decided to go ahead and have some lunch and hope the weather would improve. We put the sail back down and motored over to ‘Noahs Ark’ in Bacliff. It was a little hard to find it, but with the help from the internet (google maps) and a good lookout, we found it pretty quick. Kent had to shuttle back and forth a couple of times to get everybody over there. He had a little trouble with the outboard, but eventually managed to get us all over (and back). 🙂

Gary and Bill dropping the anchor

It didn’t help that they insisted they wouldn’t allow us inside without ID! (How ridiculous is that?! I never heard of anything like that before. Yeah, I know you can’t serve alcohol to someone without ID, but FOOD??) They lost some business over that cause a couple of our crew didn’t have ID. I never thought the USA would devolve into a state where ‘let me see your papers please’ was the accepted reality. 🙁

So, a couple of people had to stay on the boat, but they took it pretty well and there were plenty of drinks and snacks so they didn’t starve. We had a pretty good lunch ashore. The music was just right for our bunch, lots of Jimmy Buffett and 70s-80s stuff. We liked the décor, open air palapa bar, lots of funny signs and pictures around the ceiling, nice underwater painting. The food was good, I had a patty melt with onions (but it didn’t come with mushrooms).

Nice choice for lunch (except for the thing with the IDs)!

By the time we were ready to go, the sun was shining and the wind picked up enough that we could set both sails. We had a great sail back to Kemah. We had good music,  good snacks, good conversation, good wind, plenty to drink and not much traffic. Not more to ask for on a day on the water.

Alright! Now we have both sun and wind!!

Capt Jill teaching Kim how to steer a course

We dropped off the dingy and motored into the dock around 6:30 and then headed over to the Sail la Vie BBQ party. Our chefs for the event Vic and Paul had some special recipe chicken cooking and there was plenty of fruit, macaroni salad, chips and dips, cookies and drinks to go around.

Vic and Paul explain their selection of BBQ sauces

It was nice to meet some of the other members and catch up with some I hadn’t seen in a while. I haven’t been going to the meetings for a while, mostly because it takes me so long to get up to Houston and home. I don’t go up there anymore unless I have more than one thing to do.

I wound up getting home about 11:00. Too tired to do much but hit the sack. It was so nice to sleep in today. I plan to do it tomorrow too! 🙂

That’s how I’m spending my holiday weekend (nope, nothing about remembering what it’s really all supposed to be about- LABOR day and all that). Just chillin out and enjoying the time off.

How are you spending your weekend? Let’s hear it. 🙂