Sailing & Father's day's dinner

As you may have realised, dear reader, if you have been reading my blog, I’ve been doing a bit of sailing this fall. Me and Hannu decided to sign up for a 7-week basic catamaran sailing course. Today was our last session…

As often during these sessions, things started off just great with a bright blue sky and a frisky wind. And as always, much to our annoyance, we seemed to be going much slower than everbody else.

Marie, our no-nonsense instructor, assured as it had nothing to do with our (lack of) sailing skills, rather it was down to our considerable body mass; as she put it subtly: “vous êtes une équipe bien costaud” (English translation: “you need to lose weight”). In spite of this lack of speed, we had a nice morning session cruising back and forth between the ports of Saint-Laurent-du-Var and Cagnes-sur-Mer. It did get a bit chilly towards the end of the session, when the sun went into hiding behind the clouds (might be getting a bit late in the year to just wear a tee-shirt...).

After the sailing session and the unglamorous post-sailing routines (carrying the boats up from the beach, taking down the sails, undoing the rigging...), we got together for end-of-course picnic (bravely doing it outdoors inspite of the chilly weather). My contribution was somewhat meager (a bottle of cider, a bag of chips and some biscuits), but as always I made up for it by eating twice the amount anybody else did (just to be polite, of course)! That raspberry tiramisu was particularly delicious. It was good fun getting to know the other folks a bit more, especially since pretty much everybody in the group apart from me and Hannu is a local. I even enjoyed the sailing course enough to sign up for the next seven weeks (for level 2). Hopefully they'll give us bigger sails for the next lot of sessions, so we can hopefully get our speed up ;-)

For dinner, we’d been invited for an early Father's Day celebration at my parents’ place in Antibes. We were treated to a delicious fish dinner (together with my “favorite” veggie side dish of broccoli & cauliflower), accompanied by some quality Alsacian white wine. We were also brought up to date with the latest gossip amongst the local Finnish population, and heard an account of my dad's participation in a Nordic petanque competition (in spite of their best efforts, his team got beaten by a bunch of Swedes...)