W/NW The Romance of Sail: Sailing boats, yachts, dinghies and ships

A while back got an unexpected phone call from an old friend I hadn't seen in a dozen years. He and his wife had built a large sailboat and outfitted it for serious cruising. They had just gotten back from a 12 year circumnavigation and were in Victoria to clear customs, then were coming to the small harbour I live near.
Took M4 with the 15mm CV for photos so the boat isn't quite so cavernous in reality. Jim wasn't a stranger to sailing and had spent several years cruising the South Pacific in a Westsail 32 he'd built. Before they left on the circumnavigation I gave them my charts for the Galapagos which they were able to use. Told me when they got to the bottom of South America there was no wind so they ended up motoring through the Straights of Magellan, didn't want to waste the fuel going farther out to truly round the Horn. They had time in Europe going through Med and Suez.

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View from my window, night shot redux. I am on the Columbia in Astoria, OR, and about 13 or 14 miles from the mouth of the Columbia where it meets the Pacific and has created the dreaded Columbia Bar AKA as The Graveyard of the Pacific. The USCG runs a rescue school across the river in Ilwaco, WA, where the trainees get to ride that Bar a lot. It can be a terrifying ride. I'll not bore you with stories If you are really interested YT has some videos of The Bar.

But now, my view:

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Sont A7M II, Sony/Zeiss 24 - 240 zoom
 
Got out of the house and down to the boatyard and found this beauty "up on the hard". I seem partial to boat-tailed sailboats with Scandinavian names. The Sjöa, Swedish for "lake", and this one is far from one. A beauty. HB X2D, XCD 120 f/3.5, reduced in GIMP.


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1928 Herreshoff FIS 31 smoking the entire modern fleet for the gun. I don't normally race vintage, but this boat was restored to perfection and is *tight*. Still, these crafty old guys played a lucky shift in their home waters and I've never beaten a (muuuch faster) fleet of boats so badly in a one-day distance race. Magic.
 
Got out of the house and down to the boatyard and found this beauty "up on the hard". I seem partial to boat-tailed sailboats with Scandinavian names. The Sjöa, Swedish for "lake", and this one is far from one. A beauty. HB X2D, XCD 120 f/3.5, reduced in GIMP.

As a Swedish speaker "sjö" is lake, "sjön" is the lake, but "Sjön" (but more usual "havet") is the sea. "Sjöa" is in some dialects the same as "Sjön" or "havet"... :)
 
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