Raise your hand if you played hooky for all or part of a weekday to do boat work in the past month. Excellent…very shrewd of you, as the weather turned perfect from the second week of May onwards.
Now, raise your hand again if you pressed any children into service to expedite the boat work. I find that 13 and over is really the line of demarcation for significant progress being made versus needing so much instruction, encouragement and general oversight that the net output of the Team is negative to what it would be if you were working solo.
Another good predictor of productivity is whether the children you are employing can safely use modest power tools. Activities like manually sanding or cleaning require a bit of elbow grease that most kids can’t really sustain to be effective. But, slap a mask on the kid (regrettably, they are used to it by now) and give them a small electric sander or a wet-dry vacuum and you are in business. An added bonus is that they are not playing video games and are getting at least a little bit vested in the family pastime.
All of this advice is being dispensed hopefully too late. Now it’s June and the solstice approaches, undoubtedly the best holiday of the year for our pagan ancestors. You are gearing up for the avalanche of events coming this summer. At WindCheck, we knocked off our CT Spring Boat Show on the first weekend of May and have now recovered. It went very well, with 2,200 attendees and more than $20,000 raised for our friends at Sails Up 4 Cancer. Thanks all around to host Safe Harbor Essex Island, sponsors, yacht brokers and volunteers and everyone in the WindCheck Community who endured a flurry of last-minute promotion. Due to the pandemic, we got a very late start and also due to the pandemic, there were very few boats available to be in the water. But we had five out of 25 businesses exhibiting that didn’t exist before 2020, so that’s something.
So now, we get to relax and observe the relatively smooth sailing ahead for this month’s events…Block Island Race Week presented by Margaritaville, as well as Sails Up 4 Cancer’s Regatta Weekend just before at Mystic Shipyard on June 18 and 19. With Wooly Mammoth and Rock N’ Soul Revue warming up in Mystic, Mr. Buffett better bring his A game to Block!
On Thursday, June 24, our friends at the Herreshoff Marine Museum kick off their Golden Jubilee celebration with a dock party at the New York Yacht Club’s Harbour Court clubhouse in Newport featuring the New York 30 Amorita, the New York 40 Marilee and the New York 50 Spartan in what is likely the last time these lovely Herreshoff One Designs will be together. You can read about getting tickets to that and the entire event series on page seven and of course, as the proud Media Partner of the Jubilee, WindCheck will be shouting about them all summer long. And lastly don’t forget Summer Sailstice, organized by our cousins at Latitude 38.
Raise your hand if you are taking Monday, June 21 off. Excellent.
See you on the water!
Publisher
Benjamin V. Cesare
ben@windcheckmagazine.com
