The major cities on the West Coast are special for a lot of reasons, not least of which is their unusual proximity to both mountains and the sea. It's been two years since we've moved to Seattle (time flies), and in those two years most of our outdoor recreation has focused on the mountains. That's as it should be: I love the mountains, and having lived here I can't imagine moving to a place where there aren't any.
But the other part of the equation is the water. With that in mind, we decided to take some basic sailing classes. The aim isn't necessarily to go sailing by ourselves - at least not at first - but to serve as an able crew for our friend Pavel, who's done quite a bit of sailing.
Seattle is on a strip of land between a large freshwater lake - Lake Washington - and Puget Sound, which is salt water (in geographic terms, a "sound" is basically a large inlet off the Ocean). You can sail on either of them, but we're taking our classes through a sailing club at Shilshole Bay Marina in Ballard (on the Sound side of Seattle). Sunday was our first class.
"Sailing" itself - and by that I mean the act of harnessing the wind to move the boat - is actually a relatively simple concept. In calm seas and light winds, which we had, it doesn't take too long to learn the basic technique. The difficult part of day one was getting a grasp on all the terminology, learning to tie the correct knots, and going through all the safety regulations.
We had nearly perfect weather and learned a ton on our relatively basic 25' boat. It was also very enjoyable to get out on the water. Now we have to do our homework before our next class in two weeks.
I used the few free moments we had to snap a couple pictures.
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