The whalers had a term for a ship filled with whale oil — greasy luck — and if you think for a second about the conditions on a fully burdened whaler, a floating platform for rendering or “trying” whale blubber into oil, the smell, the slick deck planks, the lack of showers … you’d consider yourself lucky not to be aboard.
Sailors have a term for calm seas, so calm that the water appear covered with a sheen of oil that flatters the slightest ripple or catspaw — greasy calm. This morning was a greasy calm morning, grey skies, fog, and the prospects of a long tedious race to Popponesset for the annual picnic at the Lloyds, so I skipped it to blog, work through some paperwork, configure a new laptop (legally we are supposed to only refer to them as “notebooks”) and muck around in the garages. Definitely too greasy and too grey a July Saturday to get excited about sailing or the beach, but not foul enough to cocoon in front of the Tour de France individual time trial.
Yesterday’s 1/2-day-burnout-prevention cure worked wonders. It helps that the decision was made to turn off the air conditioning in our North Carolina headquarters at noon on every Friday, in the hope it would drive workaholics out to the golf courses and beaches a little earlier. Some grumble about having to work from home, but yesterday I pulled the plug, fired up the mower, trimmed the grass, and pressed my eldest into sailing the Senior Series with me as crew. There were no regrets about missed mail.
He did pretty good, beating five out of 13 boats and I realized I haven’t lost my touch as far as race starts go, able to now talk someone through the count-down like I was driving a radio controlled boat.