Last year, I decided to learn to sail. I’d sailed a bit as a kid, but it’d been a long time (and I never really knew what I was doing then, anyway), so I figured it’d be good to learn for real, in order to start exploring the amazing waterways we have up here in the Puget Sound area.

So I signed up for the [ASA 101](https://asa.com/certifications/asa-101-basic-keelboat-sailing/) course at [Puget Sound Sailing Institute](http://www.pugetsoundsailing.com/), took it over a weekend (after studying for a good two weeks), passed (with a perfect score, woo!) and then joined the Open Boating program at [Sail Sand Point](http://www.sailsandpoint.org/) here on Lake Washington, where I spent the remainder of the summer and early fall practicing on [Lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_\(dinghy\)), [FJs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Junior) and [Hobie Waves](https://www.hobie.com/sail/wave/), the latter of which has become a favorite for Sunday afternoons with the wife and kiddos.

This year, it’s more about getting out on the bigger keelboats for me; it’s one thing to zip around on the lake in a dinghy, where the only real risk is the occasional capsize, but it’s another thing entirely to navigate safely under sail around all the ferries and container ships moving about on [Elliott Bay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Bay). So every couple of weeks or so, I’ve been getting out on a great little [Catalina 22](https://www.catalinayachts.com/sport-series/22-sport/) with a few of my fellow Chefs — making mistakes, learning a ton, and gaining the confidence I’ll need to get around here on my own someday, hopefully soon.

Here’s a shot from a recent outing.


Getting Out There


I took this picture with my phone when we arrived on Kauai, very late, after a day-long journey that the kids handled like absolute pros. It was our first-ever trip to the island and we’d been planning for months, and I was thrilled to have made it there, at last.

It was a blustery night, though, and on the drive in from the airport, I was struck by the near-total absence of light on the island, aside from the little bit of it cast by the stars and the moon; as we wound through two-lane roads, flanked by tall grass and trees but otherwise totally alone, we saw nothing but layers of darkness vanishing into the distance, the mountains and palms like flat shapes against the sky.

The weather was pretty intense, too. This was some serious wind (at least by my standards), and combined with the darkness, the bending tree trunks and the looming mountains, you got a very real sense of how wild and remote this place still was; it was a tourist destination, sure, but at night, it sure didn’t feel like one. What it did feel like was a massive rock in the center of the ocean that had somehow survived millions of years of relentless storm and upheaval — and it really couldn’t be bothered one way or another about us.

But the *fragrance* of this place — that was what got me. With all that wind, the scents were really swirling: of the sea over the hills, the clean air, the grasses, the flowers (the flowers!), the soil — all of it. In a place so well known for its ridiculous visual beauty, it’d be easy to miss how it smells — but when there isn’t any light to illuminate that beauty, you just about can’t.


We Made It


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I like this shot (which I took in 2016) mainly because it shows what you can’t really do with an iPhone: you can’t leave the shutter open for as long as you want. Here, with my [Canon 70D](https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/details/cameras/dslr/eos-70d) and its excellent kit lens (at 18mm), I left the shutter open for 30 seconds at f8, ISO 100, in an effort to pull in as much color and light as I could. If you look closely, you can just make out the lights on a couple of planes on approach into SeaTAC, and a barely-silhouetted couple hanging out at the edge of the lake.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s a good city.
