Schooning and Dancing and Swimming

Crazy psycho glamtastic Fantablous Isobela gave me an early Christmas present - a schooner! A real, live, honest-to-goodness 70 ft from sprit to fantail schooner! It is so totally awesome. I've taken it on a few short cruises to get the feel of it, but it will take me quite a while to figure it all out. I am so looking forward to it!

The Friendly Fire show at the Riff Rock Club was canceled, it seems the hostess couldn't make it. Instead I listened to Janor sing and play the guitar at the Lost Grotto Theater. Nowhere near as good as Mack and Case, but the Grotto does tend to make people sound better.

From there I hurried to hear DJ Jocelyn and Padula at Nightclub Echo Echo - the place that Joce refers to as "where the Who's Who gather!" And wow was she right! Everyone was there, Mandi even made it back!

DJ Jocelyn has a nasty cold but was able to trooper through to the end of the show. The theme was This Day In History and she had done significant research into it; at each break she passed on interesting historical tidbits and had songs queued that complimented them. As it turns out it was the birthday of some other guy named Tycho, so Joce had called me a few hours before the show to pick three songs for a set. She played this set last; I'm not sure if that means they were good or bad but Lowen sure seemed to like them.

Joce left right after the show to try and take care of her cold, and a handful of us stayed to keep dancing to the radio. After a bit DJ Hy took over the microphone and played some of his fantastic tunes for us. Isobela and I stayed for a while and then headed out.

I had arranged swimming classes for us and they went well. We went back to Trudeau Marine, launched my schooner and found an out-of-the-way beach to moor. We changed into our bathing suits, jumped in the water and had a great time swimming and splashing around in the water.

I took a few dives off of the fantail of the schooner which was cool, and tried to climb to the top of a mast to dive from there but couldn't; I'm drawing up plans to add a diving platform up there.

I also tried a few dives from some large rocks at the edge of the surf but found that the water near them was too shallow for good diving; a quite painful lesson to learn. I also wasn't pleased with the style and form of my dives, they were mostly just jumping into the water; so Iso and I looked into diving classes at Siggy's WaterWorks, the place we took our swimming lessons.

The classes looked good, and we'll probably take them someday soon, but we really didn't feel like more lessons right then. Siggy's also sells diving boards and water slides and all sorts of pool paraphernalia. They have a large demo area that Isobela and I went around trying out all the cool stuff. I really like this one diving board, but it was way to big to fit on the top of my masts. I'll have to write to Siggy and see if he can make a smaller one that could go up there.

We found a path to a real nice beach near there, the Slippery Clam Cove, went down the stairs and chilled out in some beach chairs for a while. We talked about possibly painting the schooner's hull a different color, and maybe getting some different sails. It was a nice way to relax and wind down after another a busy, fun day.