In other news, I helped my brother-in-law Jason put the windex (no, not the cleaning product, it’s a weather vane) up on their new sailboat, the Jalanaco (named for the first two letters of each person’s name in their family).

Since I had a climbing harness, I climbed up a mast tower about 30 feet in the air, reached out to the mast to pull it over, and unscrewed the old, broken windex and put up the new one. Quite a task, especially with a little wind! Unfortunately, during the process some little gauge lines on the side got bent or broken. We think it’s because they were borrowed from a smaller windex, but we’re not sure. So…when they get a new set of those I’ll climb up again and put them up. It won’t be nearly as hard though as we’ll know what we’re doing this time! It was kind of fun to be up that high, though I’ll probably get a short nylon loop to clip into around the mast tower next time like telephone repair guys do to hold me up there.

I’ve only been out on the boat once. Sailing seems like a lot of fun, but you definitely need to know your ropes (lines!) and knots.