Sailing Blues

Vicki Conley
22” H by 33” W

Having always lived in landlocked, dry parts of the country, I’m not sure what possessed my husband and I to go back east to Annapolis to take sailing lessons with some friends in the early 2000s. Upon completing the course we promptly bought a used sailboat that was moored on Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico. Unfortunately, we lived 3 hours from the lake, were still working with little time off, and really had nowhere near enough experience or practice time to ever learn to sail it properly. We tried and failed miserably three different times over the course of a year with different funny-only-in-retrospect catastrophes each time before finally throwing in the towel and selling the boat. Living in a desert is really not the place to become a sailor.

Photo credit: Doug Conley