After taking half the lights out of the mix due to too little power (need a much bigger generator) and removing the lovely christmas trees (which we spent hours making by stringing lights up the mast) when they all started to smash into each other and rain glass down on our heads... this is the sad little Charlie Brown Xmas boat we were left with :)
August 25-27th. Portland Hood to Coast. "Hitched" a ride with a perfectly fabulous "stranger" (Tets) to Seaside, Oregon to greet Kirsten and the rest of the New Orleans runners (the Where ya' at refugees) as they finished the Hood to Coast race. Had plenty of time to wait so sampled some $1 happy hour brew. Arrived back in Portland after midnight and spent most of the next 24 hours in the hot tub, eating, drinking... snuck in a little tour of the Japanese Gardens and the Rose Garden. On Monday morning I took quite an interesting Greyhound ride to Yakima, WA (as all bus rides in this great country qualify as "interesting") to spend the 2nd anniversary of Katrina with Tasha and the kids. I moved on from there to Yosemite for some camping and then to Reno to meet up with Theresa, Olivia, and Miles at Sharon's house. I have no photos past Portland, because as I took the last one in this series I turned the camera on myself to squeeze into the frame and lo and behold my camera gave up the ghost. Yes, I turned the lens on myself and my camera (only a few months old) actually froze, never to turn on again. yikes.
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| Portland with the Refugees |
But i hung out with the KJL (the brother that is Kevin James) in Hollywood. (august 23rd, 2007) The LaBrea tarpits are not to be overlooked (as you go for a pint in Molly Malones). The martinis at the Dresden are... well... martinis with swagger and class.
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| Hollyweird with KJL |
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| Beer Cans Race 10 (Click photo to see more) |
We finished last in our last race (9th place). We placed 10th out of 14th on the season. Check out the photos of the trophies - all the more reason to spend thousands of dollars on new sails! :)The next race is the Around the Coronados in the Fall!
Here are some shots by DaWoody of us in the last race:
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| Beer Can Series Race 9 |
Yup, 6th out of 9. For those of you that are as challenged at math as I am allow me to point out that means we beat 3 boats! :) This is our best finishing place yet but ironically one of our worst deltas - time behind first place corrected for handicaps. 21 minutes behind, yikes. (we are often 15 minutes and we are trying to best our 8 minute record). Our worst was the night of the "did not finish". I have to say that with only 2 knots of wind on almost all of the downwind leg, 21 minutes is darn "okay". It was a very very slow moving race but it was hot and sunny and Kim and Jesal supplied some good old greasy KFC to keep us going. Arne was a most helpful co-captain as always and we were joined last night by his father-in-law Reinhardt. The exciting bit of the race came on the first upwind leg as we did a bit of battle with another boat in our fleet. "Inspiration" had us twice to starboard and we gracefully and skillfully fell off behind them and regained our ground without losing but inches. Our third meeting had us on starboard but old Inspiration showed no such skill attempting to tack directly in our path at the last second, stalling out in front of us, and causing us to tack to avoid collision. We quickly dug for anything red, found my dive flag, and hoisted a protest flag. We ended up beating them in the end and so did not lodge the protest, at it would not have helped our standing in that race. Anyway, I think in this series, the proper course of action for a protest is to pelt the offending craft with beer cans but we were rather short on those last night. :)
One more glorious race left! For those of you that were supposedly doing wind dances last night... you need to boogey a little harder! (Becca!)
Here is the link to the results table: http://www.cortezracing.com/CRA2007/2007%20Beer%20Cans/BC07Race9.htm#I
