WindCheck Magazine 2020 Promises

Happy New Year to all in the WindCheck Community! What resolutions have you made? If it’s to do more on the water this year, you are in luck. With a modicum of effort, you can plan cruises, regattas, weekday cocktail trips or weekday evening races for all of 2020. If you are doing Sperry Charleston Race Week (congrats to them on their 25th anniversary), or headed further south this winter (lucky you!) or the Block Island Race (congrats to Storm Trysail Club on that spring classic’s 75th anniversary) in preparation for this summer’s Bermuda race, you hopefully have planning well in hand. But what about the rest of us, who might need “stuff” to make it happen? You hold in your hands a whole catalog of service providers to help you get going. So, if you are not posing for a cover shot next Sunday of our new favorite frostbite boat (Go Sea Dogs!), what you should do is sit by a fire, and read the excellent tales within, and when you do come across an ad that prompts you on a forgotten chore, jot it down or better yet, put a note on a reminder in your phone!

One resolution I’ve made is to improve on something I try to do but need to make a more permanent habit. And that is to create a smaller environmental footprint. OK Boomer, before you roll your eyes and turn the page, I’m coming at this from a perspective of living a more “Yankee” life…which after all, should be integral to the WindCheck Community. (And any reader who falls into another age bracket, Z, Y, X, Millennial (nice beard by the way…not!), you all were literally taught this in grade school, at sailing class, at camp, in the Scouts, and at college so you get ZERO excuses for making a mess of the place. At least Boomers have the excuse of watching their parents treat the planet as if it were a lot less fragile than we now know it to be. And yet, many Yankee habits are quite qood for the environment. Reuse was a way of life. My Dad had three “junk drawers” which were 18’’ wide by 3’ long by just a couple of inches deep. They were full of salvaged or found stuff, mostly hardware, that could not be categorized neatly. The boxes shallow nature provided for easy sorting through until you found that weirdly large washer with only a ¼ inch hole that was perfect for the current project.

While I don’t want to start 2020 being a huge downer, let’s just say there is plenty of room for improvement. So…to make it easy and actionable, I’m going with the Sailors for the Sea Event Check List for the CT Spring Boat Show (May 1-3 at Safe Harbor Essex Island in Essex, CT; see page 29 and ctspringboatshow.com), which I will download from their website, sailorsforthesea.org. For everyday life, I’m going to post their Green Boaters Guide somewhere prominent in my home, like the kitchen, so my family can get in that groove when I ask them to pull their weight on organizing family fun on the water, or on the baseball diamond or where ever we roam. (That’s another resolution I am enacting…getting more assistance from the junior members of the Team!)

Anyway, like most worthy goals, this is going to take a bit of planning and then some execution. Do yourself a favor and lean on existing resources, to realize your meaningful resolutions!