Nice shot Dave, can't wait to see more. It was great to see you and Nan.

Hi Bruce, sunday was a fantastic sailing day in Maine-our best this season! We left Perry at just after 10 am in very little Westerly wind. Once out of the lee of Vinalhaven, we took an engine assisted coast into the wind off Northaven Island. We had at best 3 or 4 knots on the nose, but that gave us more than 2 knots topping at a blistering 3 knots in the middle of short tacks! Lots of traffic all under power, it was a good speed to take it all in.

Wind is squirrelly in the Thoroughfare. You see it and feel it and I later compare to what it was out on the bay to windward.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/vUTMuq][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/vUTMuq]Screen Shot 2015-08-02 at 5.10.32 PM[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/131670316@N07/]Tom Young[/url], on Flickr

The flow on the bay pushes into the Thoroughfare and helps to compress your tacks. It can be a little frustrating but we stuck it out, and our reward grew in increasing speed. Better still, tacking angles of 120 degrees and more, started to come down,...down,...

Right here I see my personal goal was reached on one tack. 90 degrees! We were able to zip out of the bottleneck - #18 and #19 - and into Southern Harbor.

This was our reward. Flat water, maybe 5 knots of Southwesterly. Perfect conditions for CHRISTMAS, we started to eat up the water to windward.

We cleared the Monument with room to spare, hoisted the mizzen staysail, and rocketed home at times hitting 7 knots in wind gusts just above 10 knots. Here's friend Harry on ALOHA off Rockport, at the end.

16 tacks(mostly ground out by my wife). We covered just more than 15 nm of what could have been, a 12 nm power run. We added an hour to our time. Too bad it went so fast!