Irene Ribeiro

Forecast 12kn or so, we got 16 or so with gusts. We started on full sail plan but decided to reef prior to first race while two of six boats bowed out. Took about five minutes and we ended up way off the starting line so first race was a wash. Second race we had the best start and had quite the lead but we ended up missing the first mark with the same impatience all three races! Finished 5-4-4 of five boats. No swim, plenty of wind to get home.

Oysters gone and the wine finished, we pushed Perseverance off the sand and turned for home. This time the current was with us, so where the way out had been about working the wind across the tide, the run back was just easy miles. The breeze had nudged up to six knots gusting into the low teens, the water still flat and the sun still high, and we made the couple of miles back to Sheepshead Bay in a little over half an hour, more or less in a straight line. We brought her onto the mooring under sail alone, packed her down, and finished the evening on the club veranda with a few drinks and some of the other members. A clean end to one of those days the boat exists for.

If the regatta a few days earlier was all broken gear and adrenaline, this was sailing's other face entirely: a warm, bright afternoon with nowhere to be but a quiet beach and a plate of oysters. Rick took us out of Sheepshead Bay on Perseverance, his Rhodes 19, with Mike, who knows the boat well, along with Irene and me. We slipped the mooring under sail in perfect wind and full sun and pointed her toward Rockaway Point. It looked like a straight shot to the beach, but the tide was running against us, so the real work was using the wind to make ground over the current. It took very little maneuvering, just the right line, and Perseverance carried us across the bay in five knots or so with the odd gust into double figures, the water almost flat and the city skyline sitting low across the water behind us. Five and a bit miles and about an hour and a half later, Rockaway Point was ahead. Here was the new trick for me after the keelboats: we pulled up the daggerboard and ran her straight onto the sand, something you simply cannot do with a fixed keel. We swam off an empty stretch of beach, then laid out oysters, a fruit salad, and a bottle of white wine on a towel, the boat resting on the sand beside us and Manhattan hazy across the bay. Hard to think of a better reason to sail somewhere. The kind of afternoon that makes the whole case for keeping a boat.

12 gusting 20, short handed flying #2. finished one race last of 6, lost 5 main sail slugs before second race. headed back and replaced them.