9/11- Hoist the Sails

At dinner the night before Wendie let me know that Daniel's friend Matt was coming up the next day to go sailing and would I want to go. Fuck yeah I do. In my first two days in Port Townsend I get go tree climbing and sailing, that's a good run. On top of it, it happens to be the weekend of the famed Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, so we'd be sailing with the pretty boys.

Again we rose early for more oats, Matt showed up and they consulted the sea charts, then off we went. There's no mucking about over here. We spent 7 hours out on that boat just roving around in Mystery Bay, then made our way out into Port Townsend Harbor where they were racing sailboats and showing off their schooners. Once again I neglected to use sunblock and by now my entire face is probably just a big skin cancer cell, but what ever, it was done in good fun.

Matt and Daniel are old sailing buddies from many years past. Matt is out of Marblehead, MA so he and Daniel were schooling me as far as what knots to do, how to hoist the sails, tacking, steering, etc. Daniel had also brought out his little dingy, which was what he used to get to the boat moored out in the harbor, and occasionally someone would decide to pull up along side the sailboat and get towed for a bit. Daniel even got in it and towed the sailboat with it over a sandbar into the main harbor.

For some while now I'd been looking to learn a bit more how to sail so this was quite a great day for me. By the end of it we were all knacked so we anchored it out by the town and rowed in for some coffee before going to get the cars. I volunteered to stay behind and watch the dingy as they would likely be gone for an hour or so.

While sitting on the beach watching the boat, I got to talking with quite an interesting guy. He was another unplugger. James was an older guy out of Denver by about two weeks. He was a builder who lived down by the Tech Center back there and did work for the governor and mayor. In the past month he got burnt out on feeling like "a bureaucrat" as he put it, pulled everything, and left. He got a ticket to San Diego and has been hitching his way up for the past two weeks until he got here. He too is interested in picking up a sailboat, knows nothing about it, and wants to learn how to sail down to Belize. Along the way, he'd picked up a companion, Amber, who was out of Pennsylvania, though they met in San Francisco.

We talked a bit, and he was still in the throes of feeling that energy of cutting free, but he was full of it. He was loving not being bound down anymore and agreed that this was the kind of living he needed. Meeting him was more impressionable to me just that I was meeting yet another one breaking out in this past year, and got me wondering to myself again why it is that this breaking free from these constraints seems to be increasing, or is it just that I've put myself in those path ways with breaking out myself.

Anyway, soon enough Daniel showed up and we returned home for dinner. Matt stayed over as well that night and I got access to the computer and spent way too long editing photos into the night.