The plan for the day was a sail with CRAB (Chesapeake Regional Accessible Boating) in the Morning and a Wednesday Night Race as a nightcap. The CRAB sail was a real joy, with decent winds, clear skies, and not too crazy hot temps once we got out there, and the bonus was sailing with very pleasant folks.,
The 'guest' was an active duty member of the Coast Guard. She had been an active sailor, but had not been sailing in a while.. As it turned out, my crewmate for the day is her mother, who is also an active volunteer with CRAB. All in all a very pleasant way to spend a morning.
After the first wave of thunderstorms had blown through, we had prepped the boat and headed out towards the race course. We had just unrolled the mainsail, loaded it in the feeder, and begun the hoist when we heard that the Race had been cancelled due to the possibility of the next wave of thunderstorms rolling over the fleet. It felt like another one of Chalie Brown's attempts at kicking a football that Lucy had just pulled away at the last moment.
Slightly deflated we returned to the dock and put the boat back to bed.
But as it turned out, the thunderstorm never hit, so the crew lounged about the cockpit swapping stories laden with lots of laughs, and sharing the camaraderie that is one of the best parts of racing. In this case, the skipper had come fully equipped for this occasion with a cooler full of crab cakes that he cooked up for the crew. The crab cakes were supposed to be a 'post-race' dinner, but what the heck, (to paraphrase The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) 'we don't need no stinking races'. . Desert was 'burger' cookies. One of the crew made a super salad as a main course for us vegetarians and as a side dish for the omnivores. That definitely took the sting out of not being able to race on a pleasant evening.