Come Sail Away

Today, I finally made good on one of the things that I'd been looking to do: MIT offers free sailing classes, and I love boats and water, but hadn't gotten around to getting to a class yet with everything else going on.

We were given around 3 hours of instruction, and then put into the boats. We found out afterwards, that the conditions out there were super-challenging today - hard wind that was changing direction every few minutes. The dinghy was tough to control - every time we trimmed the sail, the boat would catch the wind so fiercely that it would threaten to capsize (that did happen to several people).

It was after a few of those tries that my partner in the boat let me know that she had water phobias and was starting to panic... a few minutes later, she was in a panic. Unfortunately, with no accelaration from the wind, we were stuck in the water... And every time we tried to accelarate the boat would threaten to capsize until we got going (turning the boats is actually one of the hardest things to do). Finally, one of our classmates who is a volunteer came over on a motorboat and authoritatively told me to take over doing both sailing responsibilities - steering (which I had been doing), and trimming the sail to make it catch the wind and power the craft. I was able to sail back to the dock by myself - which was pretty challenging but fun and a great learning experience, though my landing wasn't so smooth once I got there.

We were referred to materials to review to become more proficient in sailing, and after we have a good idea of what's going on, we can go and take out a boat whenever. I'd love to do it, but that puts into question, do I have enough time to add this to my plate with everything else?