damp but good & flowers

We had seven show up this morning for practice. Makes it a little difficult in an OC6! We tried to go out with Kristen steering from sitting on the tail of the boat but it was too cold for her to continue that for very long. We went back to the beach and I got out and rigged my OC1 to go out solo. They headed out for Denny Park, directly across the lake from SSP. I busted my butt to catch them over there. They had stopped for some drills allowing me to catch up. Then they headed north a ways and I realized it was going to be too hard on my back to try and keep up with them so I decided to head back in to the beach.

I'd brought my camera out again in the housing and had passed it off to Kristen to take a few snaps. She seemed to have a little difficulty with figuring out how to point and shoot as evidenced by the second photo shown here, there was a whole series like this one! Kinda funny actually.

A bit later in the day Diane, Dave, his girls, and I headed up to Skagit to the tulip festival. They'd extended it by a week because the cool weather had delayed the blooms opening. It was pretty grey and rainy, ranging from barely spitting to actively raining lightly. Thankfully it wasn't pouring. The soil there is mostly clay and when you add a bit of water to clay it gets really slippery. People really showed kindness by offering hands to help others through the worst of the slippery parts. Tulip Town has really great fields of flowers. I'm glad I made it up this year, I love looking at the tulips. And I have a history of photos of tulips. When I was in high school I snapped a few photos of some slightly past their prime tulips that my mother had planted in a half oak barrel. One turned out particularly well. I don't have it digitally, but I recently got a scanner so I'll try to get that scanned in sometime soon.