A Full Boat for a Glorious Daysail!

Well it started at the NYPL, where I volunteer in the Map room. My efforts there to organize a sailing excursion among the map room staffers was not successful. Conflicting calendars. I was more successful with my other home at the Library: the Volunteer Office, in the basement, where i take my breaks. This morning I picked up Ayeola and her mom, Donna. The former works in the volunteer office and the later is a guard there. They are originally from Trinidad and Grenada, so we had the islands to discuss during our drive to the Club.
There we met Joseph, who is a new member of the Club and a retired psychoanalyst, and Moira, head of the Library's Volunteer Office and her husband, Bob and their teen-aged son, Truth. Here we are in the launch, except for Bob, our photographer de jour.

From left to right: Ayeola, Donna, Joseph, me, Moira and Truth.
This this adds up to seven souls which made for a pretty full house while they were touring ILENE's interior. But we all fit rather comfortably once we got underway and took our seats in the cockpit.
We sailed off the mooring, if you could call that sailing. In like two knots of wind we were not going very fast, especially trying to exit Eastchester Bay against the incoming tide. The above photo shows how flat the water was. I finally turned on the engine and we motored around Big Tom, through Hart Island Sound and past Execution Rock. Then we shut off the motor to drift for a while before the wind picked up.
Then came the fun part. We sailed for about 3.5 hours, deeply into Hempstead Bay and then beating back to the Club.  Everyone took a turn at the wheel and all did quite well.

After a while, at a tack, when i rolled up the genoa, I put out the small jib instead, which was all the sail we needed. Once we got the wind we averaged about seven knots. You take chances when sailing with newbies. The seasickness risk is a constant, but none of that today. The risk is that the newcomers will be turned off to sailing by the boring experience of sailing in very light air. Sailing has three phases: Boredom, Terror and Ecstatic Joy. We experienced the boredom first, skipped the terror and enjoyed the best. Truth has an interest in marine bioogy and is scheduled to participate in a gull banding activity at Great Gull Island, which, as I pointed out on the chart to him and his parents, is a tiny speck of an island at the southern end of Long Island Sound's Race.