Sailstice at Lake Eustis Sailing Club

We celebrated the Summer Solstice by taking part in the Sailstice event hosted by Lake Eustis Sailing Club.  We've been there before and it's a neat place to spend a couple of days.  The lake is pretty small and combined with summer Florida weather the sailing is often drifting and roasting or running for your life from thunderstorms.  This time it was no different but we got pretty lucky and managed to do a fair bit of sailing.  Most of the storms missed us but it's still unnerving and dangerous to be out there with thunderheads all around.

    We are at the round blue dot.

That's Rex and Kathy in eyeCod enjoying the storm driven breeze.

Heading back in for shelter.

Everyone back at the docks to wait out the storms.

Carol and Dennis with Duckling.

Duckling and Goat.

Mel and Glenda organized a poker chip run.  Bags of poker chips were placed on three buoys out of sight of the club.  We were told the general direction of each buoy and had to find them and collect a poker chip from each.  This is our track of the run.  Dennis got a head start so we just hung back and let him find the chip bags, then we headed straight for them.  Yes we are lazy like that.

Glenda discovered blinking LED pool noodles and got everyone to use them as mast lights for a night time sail parade.  There wasn't enough wind for a parade but we had a lot of fun bobbing around in the dark trying to guess who was who.

Dennis and Carol emerge from the night.

Sailing at night with no wind is weird as you have no feedback.

A bit of mid lake socializing.

Our sailing performance dropped precipitously when rafted up like this.

Glenda and Mel float by in Q/T.

And then they speed away.

Scott Baumer on Sea Pearl Tri "Kitty B" sails by.

At one point during the weekend we got some perfect wind.  I was solo in Goat and was fully powered up but still could sail flat when hiked out.  The water was absolutely flat.  In these ideal conditions Goat pointed like crazy.