I went with the University of Washington’s Yacht Club on their Spring Trip to Blake Island. An island that you can only get to by boat. We went on a keel boat with winds about 2 knots at most. We motored most of the way there, but spent about three hours slowly tacking, zigzagging back and forth across a part of the Puget Sound, looking at the Space Needle, its top painted “Galaxy Gold” for their 50^th anniversary. Our crew was very mellow and on the way there and back, we mostly sat quietly and enjoyed the gray calm and the occasional accidental tack. When the person at the steering wheel doesn’t watch where the wind is blowing, the winds will decided to push the sail to the opposite side of the boat and we have to adjust the ropes tied to it accordingly. The Yacht Club arranged for a group camp site and a Salmon dinner for the evening. Dmitriy and I fell in with the Russian group (and their American friends) where we enjoyed Russian Standard Vodka and some Sailor Jerry. We had a brief interlude with what appeared to be the Crème Brulee subgroup of the yacht club. They had brought little brulee bowls of crème, poured some sugar and fired away at it with a little travel torch they brought. They all had something to say about the joys of cracking the brulee surface.

We woke up too late for the pancake breakfast. I seem to never be in time for those sorts of things, so I wasn’t disappointed. We were on duty for making sandwiches. Quite the operation, making about 200 sandwiches. The sail back was about the same as on the way there. 3 hours in, Skipper Skip (his name really is Skip!) said “bored? Alright, we’re going to motor in.” Music to my ears. Not that I don’t like sailing, but this is the hardcore kind of sailing, combatting boredom when you have no place to go.

I filmed this using my point and shoot Kodak share camera and edited it using Windows Live Movie Maker. In the editing process, I clicked the button that said “Auto-movie” and it cross-faded my clips together. I changed the length of most of my clips to a few seconds, deleted ones that ruined the flow and voila! My weekend in a video nutshell.