Last sail of the season

The Cal 20 has been on the hard for a few weeks now but my other boat came out yesterday (Monday). I got in two last sails--one on Sat. and one on Sunday. The second one was mostly because an old friend and former boss--at a sailing school/rental--hadn't been out on my boat this summer. Between the two of us, we have over a hundred years of sailing experience. So of course we managed to go aground in the shallow place that everybody knows about. The wind was light and we were pinching pinching pinching to stay in the dredged channel. "You can go outside the green buoy," he said. "There's enough room to take it to port." About 20 seconds later the boat was slowing and pretty soon it was going anywhere. I raised the centerboard and started the outboard hard in reverse. A minute later it dawned on me that dropping the mainsail might be a good idea (duh). With that, the boat began her to the dredged channel. No harm done, except for a few dents to the ego. I mean, every fool knows it's shallow there.... We had a good chuckle over the folly and ignored the other sailor who passed us, giving us the "what kid of fools are they" look. Monday the boat came out and got tucked into a new storage building. The old one has been dedicated to heated storage and I'm too cheap for that. The yard guys said that the boats that had previously been in the old building got diverted into one of two others. The boats that are carefully maintained went into the pretty, clean building. The boats that aren't went into the one that's dark, crowded, and full of birds. My boat got the nice building. Guess I'll have to order up the annual shipment of donuts for the yard crew. Chris Campbell