The week-end of May 30-31 at the Jacksonville Landing, in parallel to the tall ship festival was the HEART OF SAILING!

I was invited to participate by Graeme from Skimmer (J30) earlier in the week. I had no sailing plans, so I was happy to now have a good cause to go sail for! Luckily Ted volunteered to help me sail Salsa Verde Saturday… (While everyone else was gone camping!)

I motor-sailed Salsa Verde to the Landing Friday night, where I got a warm welcome from George and Graeme who waited for me after setting things up for the event. My ride with the tide, the genoa #1, my “now happy” engine and Ted’s chart plotter GPS (Thank you!!!!!) was the fastest of all the week-end, peaking above 8kt I left Julington Creek just before sunset and “landed at the Landing” 2.5h later.

It was nice to share pretzels with everyone and hear their stories! I also met Skip from the Schooner Mistress, the prettiest boat out there! The rest of the evening was loud… and so kept being the middle of the night! I thought I could go to sleep at 2am when the band stopped, but no, the radio came on for another hour! What do you do when you can’t sleep… You clean the boat!

Saturday morning while George and Graeme were being famous doing a TV interview, I had breakfast at the Landings and wondered around the heavy crowd and the big boats. When they came back, we had one family for the 10 am sail, so we went all together on Skimmer. There was not much wind at the rendez-vous but we managed to play the current to stay out of the way of the bridge. After a good long lunch we had 3 families for the 2 pm ride, so both boats went out for 2 hours. Then another tour was planned at 4 pm, but the people did not show up, so Salsa Verde took the first family available from the crowd. Everybody seemed happy about their experience, even if the wind was not giving its best exposure. All day we had the captain’s hat traveling from heads to heads, on whoever was at the helm… small hands to big hands! Water bottles and cookies were shared all afternoon while kids were wandering around exploring every little corners of my sailboat.

Clic here for tons of picture of the event

Bottom line, Congrats George for putting this together, and let’s do this again in the fall!!!