The tale of the breached breaches

The tale is truthfully about stained breaches, but what kind of a title would that be? An unseemly one for sure. 'Tis better to be unseamly.

We arrived at our new anchorage this morning and headed for shore, then split off in different directions to blow off our ya-yas. I hiked to the top of a ridge and got back to the dinghy shortly before the other two. While I waited the wind started to build, blowing across the bay. We were one of the first boats to arrive today, so that gave us pole position in the upwind corner of the bay. While changing out of our hiking shoes and into our beach shoes (the shoes we don't mind getting wet), we strategized about how best to get back to Quijote without being blown out into the San Jose channel. We decided to drag the dinghy along the shore to where we were upwind of the boat and let the breeze blow us back to the boat. We just didn't want to miss it. Kay speculated that we might not need to worry: if the wind blew the dinghy past the boat, maybe it would blow us to the other side of the bay. Then it would just be a matter of of hiking the dingy along the shore to the other side, where we could try again. I couldn't decide if that would be considered optimistic or not.

So we pulled the dinghy along the shore to the upwind corner. Of course the shore wasn't a white sandy beach along that stretch. That would be way too easy. No, it had to have super slick, round rocks covered in algae and barnicles. The dinghy faired better than I did, since I was holding on to the bow line while I hopped from rock to rock and the wind was blowing it off the rocks. For my part, all it took was one stumble and I found myself nursing a bloody gouge on my ankle. Ah well; it goes with the territory. As it turns out, we needn't have worried. Unnoticed in all the dinghy futzing, the wind died, so we were able to row back to the boat in relative calm.

Back on the boat I went to work cleaning my battle wound and ended up with half a bottle of iodine on my shorts. I guess yellow isn't the worst color stain, but it's unseemly enough.

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