Today and yesterday were worth a million dollars. It is the kind of brilliant jewel-blue-green June that makes Maine a summer delight. There are buttercups and daisies nodding by the side of the road, lupine and roses and peonies blooming, and the trees and the grass are this lush sweet green, swaying in the summer wind. It's spectacular. The evening lingers until late, and the warm dusky glow is rosy-purple-orange-blue fading into a starry cornflower. It smells like a ripe summer night, like possibility, like skinny dipping and a full moon.
I spent today being the Principal Race Officer for a regatta my yacht club runs every year. My grandfather actually started the regatta, way back when. I did it last year, with my father, and I think I'll plan to do it again next year. I was at the club for 12 hours, and came home with some homework. I'll be there again most of the day tomorrow. I'm wiped out and contented.
I had eight volunteers helping me on the water. Five of us were in the big race committee boat, and I had two small motorboats, each with two people, helping me move marks around. There were maybe 40 boats racing, in six different classes. We were busy. One of the things that was cool was that the people on the race committee boat were all women. I didn't do that on purpose, but when I discovered it was possible, I thought it was kind of neat, and encouraged the guys to go on the mark boats and the women to stay on the RC boat. I am quite certain there's never been an all-women race committee for a big regatta at my club before, and I think it's cool to be part of. We weren't perfect, but we were close -- efficient, smooth, calm, and focused.
Ruby shot the gun almost 50 times, and never misfired. We did 12 starting sequences and one postponement, and we set four different courses for the PHRF classes, sending A, B, C, and D classes on different routes around the bay. We had to move the line and the one-design's drop mark a couple of times, but the southerly breeze came in pretty steady and let us run races instead of making infinite adjustments. I tried to set the PHRF courses so that the classes would all finish approximately at the same time, and I was perhaps a little too successful in my estimate, so we had the cruisers, the J/24s, and the A class boats all converging on the finish line from different angles at the same time. It was challenging to track the finishes, but the classes didn't interfere with one another and I don't think the racers knew how much the committee was multitasking as we scored the different races. I felt like I did a much better job than I did last year, and was calmer and happier while doing it.
Tomorrow the forecast is for temperatures near 90 on land. That means a beautiful seabreeze and another day where being on the water will feel like a luxury.
Here's a picture of two of my team members, Mary and Ruby, 
taking a rare breather between one-design races.