I mentioned to I.B. that I had never been sailing after dark. In fact, most of the dinghies I have sailed don't even have nav or running lights, so they wouldn't even be safe to take out after dark. Last night the water was choppy with little white crests. The wind was wipping around at over 15 kts. In other words, the perfect night for sailing.

There are a lot of differences between a dinghy and a keel boat. The prime difference is that with a keel, there's basically nothing you can do to flip the boat. Dinghies flip all the time when heeling over in high wind. As crew, I am always working to balance my weight as far out on a dinghy as possible to let us heel over without flipping. I hadn't realized that after 7 years of dinghy sailing how instinctual this behavior had become. So once we got the boat going (a challenge in itself for me... again, not used to putting up sails while underway rather than at the dock), and we were heeling well over, not hard over (water wasn't coming up over the rails or anything), I was fighting every instinct I had to climb up on the high side and hike my body as far out as we could. With a boat that heavy my relatively small mass wouldn't have done any good.

Every time the wind shifted a little bit, I grabbed onto something with the presumption that we were just on the edge of tipping over. Even though we weren't. Because it was a keel boat. Keel = stable. I noticed at this point I had a death grip on the tiller. Luckily for me, I.B. gave me a nice shoulder massage while I sailed which helped me relax a little.

But by the time we were on the next tack, I got the feel for it, sat back, enjoyed the wind in my hair, watched the moon dance over the mast, and had an awesome time.

I love sailing.

Stupid work did get in the way though and got back to the house by midnight so I could rest up for another day in the mines. (Mines = air conditioned office and desk in a government building.)