Day Six

Hello all!
Its Saturday and we're tired! After sleeping in a welcomed hour and a half extra, we loaded into the vans and headed to Eckerd for breakfast before making our way to the Myakka State Park. We rented some canoes and explored the lake, looking for wildlife. Packed lunches and plenty of wildlife made for a great time out on the water, even if we missed doing it with sails.

A short drive to the Siesta Key beach left us with the afternoon to burn, (pun-, well ok it was intended). We did the beach thing for a few hours and headed home.

Tomorrow we start with devotions on the beach and then have the day to explore. Monday we get to put the FJs through the paces. More to come!

just to make you jealous...

This morning, my roommate, Derek, and I were delighted to see on the CNN weather report that while the Midwest was being dumped on by another winter storm, the Tampa Bay area would enjoy the highest temperatures in the nation. I treasured each of the 78 wonderful degrees that graced Florida today as we paused our sailing adventures and took in some of the sights in the area, namely, Myakka State Park and Siesta Beach in Sarasota.

At Myakka, we canoed with alligators--I only saw one, but at five feet from our canoe, and with its ominously beady eyes and hulking body, one was plenty enough for me. Later we drove to Siesta Key to experience what is hailed as the world's finest, whitest sand. Throughout the day I discovered that we are pretty adept at entertaining ourselves. First we played "Ethical Moral Dilemmas," a game we made up in which we pose, well, you guessed it, ethical moral dilemmas. Annica the philosophy minor borrowed some harrowing hypothetical situations from her ethics class (if you could kill one person to save 19 or walk away knowing they would all be murdered, which would you choose?) while Derek agonized over his equal love for international development and dogs (if you could eradicate malaria in Cameroon but you had to kick a puppy to do it, would you do it?). After this game, Abigail and I, the scintillating and saucy English majors of the group, began writing acrostics with everyone's names--not quite G-rated enough for the blog. Finally, Abigail and Annica (also a splendid art major) drew up a rousing rendition of Name That Bum--pictured below. All in all, a pretty spectacular day, I'd say.

Myakka. Not a cloud in the sky.

Walking on Siesta's famously cool, heat-resistant sand.

Name That Bum.

Annica reads aloud to us from some assigned reading for class (yes, we do indeed get homework done).

the flying juniors: a survival story.

"Capsizing in an FJ isn't like one second you're sailing and the next you're in the water," explained Captain Richard, our main sailing instructor, this morning before we rigged and boarded our boats. "It's more like, 'eek, eek, oops, we're done, splat.'"

This advice was meant to encourage us before we intentionally tipped over our boats into Frenchman's Creek. And surely enough, the capsizing itself did happen in a sort of slow-motion fall. My partner and I eased into a tack, and instead of switching sides to balance the boat as the sails shifted from starboard to port (it's still strange for me to be using these terms out of the context of Popeye cartoons from my youth), we let the sails collapse on top us and dropped into the water. With our boat-rescuing maneuvers fresh in my head from class, I swam to the horizontally-exposed underside of the boat and heaved all of my 135 pounds onto the boat's centerboard--a sort of counterweight that juts out below the hull--and willed the craft with all of my might and mind to a right-side-up position. And a determined will it certainly took; I practically had to stand up on the thing and stomp it back underwater.

The boats themselves, however, rarely operate at such a dawdling pace. In fact, they tend to catch the slightest puff of air and fling themselves across the water. It's fantastic for racing, of course, but it also, well, can be terrifying. This morning's adventures led me to discover this little fact as well--albeit the hard way. Hardly had I found myself back into the stern when it required my instant and assiduous attention. Finding itself properly righted, the 300-pound vessel (compared to the 3,000- to 10,000-pound keelboats we had been sailing up to this point) scampered across the water at the soonest whisper of wind. Add to this reality the fact that, in FJs, the skipper has to both mind the tiller and trim the mainsail, and well, maybe you won't judge me so harshly when I tell you that seconds later I slammed into the dock.

It was around this time that I acquired another sailing habit: cussing. It may or may not be a permanent addition to my sailing persona, but I have to admit it seemed a fittingly cathartic response to such nautical humiliation. The good news is that neither boat nor dock were damaged, and I have a feeling I'm not the first person to have lost a battle with the wind (which just sounds so much better than blaming it on my clumsiness). Plus, my straits as an FJ skipper substantially improved this afternoon, when we left the creek for the larger bay, where big expanses, longer instruction, and steadier winds restored my faith in myself as a potentially competent FJ sailor.

And finally, some photos.

Eckerd's slip that docks the keelboats we use each day.

A small beach on Eckerd's campus, and a nice place for lunch most days.

Stowing and cleaning the boats after an afternoon of sailing.

Some extra tips from Coach Jim after FJ-mania.

Derek and Abigail doing some extra studying...

...and doodling.

from the novice.

I am probably the least qualified student in this class to write anything about sailing. After all, before three days ago, the extent of my knowledge about sailboats was that they were on Old Spice deodorant. In fact, when I approached Professor Ubels to sign up for the Interim "Learn to Sail" course last fall, he eagerly recounted a sailing story (something that I have recently discovered sailors love to do) about an "accidental jibe" that nearly knocked out a student, amusedly chuckling to himself all the while. Mystified, I slapped my knee and forced a laugh, lacking the slightest inclination as to what a jibe was or how it could be accidental--or even intentional, for that matter. Instead of fleeing Professor Ubel's office, however, I allowed my reservations to be absolved by blissful, naive optimism about quick learning and galvanizing visions of a tropical January. Even if I failed at sailing, I thought, at least I would fail in balmy weather and with a burgeoning tan, no less.

Indeed, both temperament and temperature have been on my side so far. The weather has done it's part: each day has reached the threshold of 70 degrees or more, with auspiciously forecasted highs to come. And despite my utter incompetence in sailing as recent as Monday, three full days of training at Eckerd have dramatically developed my nascent skills as a sailor. Each day our class of 20 students-cum-seafarers spends around two hours in classroom instruction and five to six hours on board keelboats, literally learning the ropes of basic sailing mechanics and technique. Each boat holds a crew of four students and one instructor--all of whom seem to eagerly espouse the kick-the-bird-out-of-the-nest-and-hope-it-flies pedagogical technique. And besides some fraught nerves, it's worked amazingly well, if I do say so myself. In 72 hours I have become best friends with the anatomy of the basic keelboat, the essential vocabulary of sailing, five rope knots and counting, methods of sensing the wind's direction with just my ear, the best ways of turning the boat into the wind (tacking) and away from the wind (jibing), and how to press the auto-pilot button when I'm tired of doing all of that stuff (just kidding on that last one). In fact, not only do I now understand what an "accidental jibe" is--that is, when the wind catches the sail and hurls the boom to the opposite side of the boat--but I've even done it myself a few times (don't worry, everyone ducked in time). And the challenges continue. Today, for instance, instead of lackadaisically meandering across the bay as we have been doing so far, all five boats navigated a triangular course in the middle of bay, which quickly became competitive and brought out some of the feuding natures of student and instructor alike. For round two, tomorrow we'll leave the familiar keelboats behind for the revered FJs (Flying Juniors), much smaller boats that hold two people at most and are known for their "responsive nature," which I've discovered is just a euphemism for what is otherwise known as a tendency to topple their operators into the water.

An FJ

There isn't too much to fret about, though, because the first thing we're doing tomorrow is intentionally capsizing, so we'll be more than sure how to right our boats again if and when they throw us into the bay. Maybe not the best way to start a morning, but even when I'll be soaking wet, I'll still be in Florida--a novelty that just doesn't wear off. More adventures to come!