We went sailing on Father's day. Or at least we tried. I'm too depressed to tell you the whole story right now. See the next entry.

There's this moment, right after you hoist the sails and turn off the motor, when the wind fills the sails and the boat starts to heel. The motor falls silent, and you can hear the water splashing past the bow and gurgling past the transom.

Pull the tiller up a little, and the bow falls off and the sails fill and the a little spray kicks up over the deck and you're off across the water. Playing the tiller and the sheets, feeling the wind and the waves.

That moment you connect with generations of sailors heading back into history and forward into eternity. For an hour, a day, a week you use man's skill to harness the power of the Mother, not to impose our will on Nature as we so often do in this day, but to cooperate with the world we find around us to move us where we want or need to go.

It's been a long time coming this year. Odyssey's transom was more work than I anticipated. Little League seemed to expand to take over our lives. The farm needed more work than ever to get under control this spring. Cats and dogs and chickens and children and deadlines at work seemed to pile up an endless screaming demand for more and more and more of my time...

But last night I put the last of the gear aboard Odyssey. The anchor is stored below. The tiller and the rudder are waiting on the cabin seat ready to be shipped. The safety equipment and flares and ropes and fenders and cushions and all the many things that need to be aboard are stowed in their places on board. I tied the halyard shackles to the new halyards. I spread the sails out on the lawn and refolded them to ease the strains of being packed into sail bags for the winter.

Soon. A day. A week. Maybe two. And then we'll be out on the water and the motor will be off and I'll pull the tiller up and the sails will fill and the only sound will be wind and the soft gurgle of the water closing behind Odyssey as we rejoin the sailors.

The first weekend in May is the official opening day here on Puget Sound, with a big parade of boats through the Montlake Cut, crew races, and much drinking of the grog. Not that I was waiting for opening day, or anything, but now that the season is on, I want to be sailing.

I've got most of the way through the pre-launch check list. The only things left are to:

• Start the motor and make sure it'll run.
• Tie the halyards onto the headboard shackles.
• Load the cushions and other gear into the boat.

I'm putting some things off for later. The lifelines still need to be replaced, someday I might write down the fiasco trying to replace them turned out to be. And I'll put off building a mast crutch and putting on a jib downhaul 'til later when I may actually get a chance to single-hand.

It's getting to be time to take Odyssey out. By this time next month I should have a couple of trips to share.

Odyssey sat outside all winter, and she is showing the results: her entire hull is covered with a dingy greyish green coat of scum. There are pine cones in the cockpit, needles in the scuppers, and in one place there is actually a tiny little tree growing in the rub rail. Clearly, it's time to clean up.

On the 23rd, Joey and I pulled Odyssey out of the barn and hauled her over by the arena where there is a hose bib and a slope so the dirty water runs away. We got out the scrub brushes, the hose, and some rags and went to work, using a scrub brush over her entire hull and deck.

It was a typical early spring day in Pugetopolis. The sun was shining when I started, but in the hour and a half we washed on the boat, we had: Sun. Rain. Hail. Wind. Clouds. At times we had all 5 at once.

When we were done, Odyssey looked a lot nicer. Gone was the dingy green look, replaced with white and blue that looked like someone cared. There are a few places that I missed, like the inside of the cockpit, but overall it's a big improvement.

The best part of the whole afternoon was working with Joey. He's reaching that point in a child's life where they stop being a drag and actually start becoming helpful little workers. He worked for almost an hour before getting bored and distracted, and even when he stopped scrubbing he didn't make the job harder.

With all the grime washed off, I put Odyssey back into the barn so she'd stay clean. Next, it's time to shine her up.

The big project on Odyssey this weekend was filling the holes on the port side of her transom. This is the first time that I've repaired holes in fiberglass with epoxy putty, so all in all it's a learning experience.

I bought an epoxy kit from West Marine, it comes with 5 or 6 packets of pre-measured epoxy, some fillers (microballons and colloidal sillica), pots, stirring sticks, etc. I look over the directions, but there's no mention of which filler to use in which situation, so I'm on my own. I know that microballoons are for sanding, so I decide to use the sillica.

The kit comes with a pair of surgical gloves, so I put them on. Joey asks me why I'm doing that, I tell him so I don't get any chemicals on my hands. Joey climbs into the loft of the barn, he doesn't want to have anything to do with chemicals.

My first challenge is mixing up a pot of putty. The wind is blowing through the barn and that darn filler is light and doesn't want to get out of the cup it came in and into my mixing cup. I move to the tack room and now it pours fine. I mix some filler in, then some more, until I have a putty that looks pretty good.

Back out to the boat. I use one of the stirring sticks to trowel the putty into the holes. It's too thin and starts to slump. I dig most of it back out, put it back in the pot and add some more filler. Now it's looking really thick. I trowel it and and it works. Maybe five minutes later all the holes that I'm filling in this session are done.

So, once I'm done, there is some extra filler outside the holes, smeared around the transom. I'm not looking forward to it hardening, so I think, "Hey, let's try acetone. That might clean it up." So I get out a rag and some acetone and try rubbing it on the extra filler. To my delight, it appears to be taking off the extra. I clean up all the extra filler on the transom. (While I'm doing this, Joey asks "What's the awful smell?" "Acetone" I reply. Joey climbs down from the loft and goes to play on the haystack where he can't smell the acetone.)

That's all for Saturday. I clean up the mess, tossing the used cups, stirrer, gloves (need to get more gloves) in a plastic bag and putting the plastic bag in the garbage.

On Sunday I walked out to check and see how things were going. I learned two new things:

• Epoxy that goes off in 20 minutes at 70 degrees is still tacky after 12 hours at 38 degrees or less. Working in these cold conditions does wonders for the pot life of epoxy.
• Cleaning up the overspill with acetone didn't work as well as I'd hoped. All the extra filler was gone, but the hull is now stained with an orange color that I can't figure out how to remove.

That's how things sit today. On Wednesday (the 12th) I got a chance to go out and poke the filler, it's hardened up now. (Why so long? The farm. The weather. Little League practice. 4H. I'm lucky to get an hour or so a week to play on Odyssey. Next I have to figure out how to take care of the delamination and how to get rid of the orange color on the transom.

The weather is crummy on Saturday afternoon, so instead of cleaning up the horse's paddock in the rain, I decided to put a little time in on Odyssey.

First, there is an old broken up block from the original main sheet system on the port side (the starboard one was gone before I got Odyssey). It's ugly, non-functional, and I want it gone. I don't want to unscrew the padeye it's connected to because I'm not sure how I'd get it back on, and the padeye will be useful if I ever install a tiller tamer. I try to use a hacksaw to cut the loop on the block, but the stainless steel block is stronger than the teeth of my hacksaw (need to remember to buy new hacksaw blades when I go to the hardware store).

Not one to daunted by mere details, I break out the power tools. Ron, my father-in-law, gave me an angle grinder for Christmas. He intended that I use it to clean up rust on my trailer and/or my keel, but he isn't around. About 10 minutes later (get the grinder out of the box, laugh at the fractured English instructions, put the grinding wheel on, get an extension cord, plug everything together, then start cutting) the block is bouncing into my trash bucket. Success.

Then I get Katie to help me rebed the bow fairleads. As usual with things put on by this person, the fairleads are bedded and have a backing plate. He just chose to use galvanized screws instead of stainless. I broke the bolts loose, cleaned up the deck and the fairlead, then re-bedded with Life Caulk and fastened with stainless screws. Having Katie to help makes this go much faster, she stays below and puts the washers and nuts on, I stay on deck and turn the screws.

Next, one of the mast base blocks for turning halyards back to the cockpit is on backwards. How the original installer missed that, I'll never know. The nuts are just finger tight(!), so I remove them below, then go on deck and pry the block off the deck. No bedding. Argh! There are two other base blocks and three turning blocks that match this one, so I check. No bedding there either. Turns out there was a person who used high-quality parts (Harken blocks), stainless bolts, etc. to put parts on Odyssey, but was too lazy to bed them properly. Disgusted, I tape the deck, bed the fitting in the right way, then tighten the nuts. Katie has had enough for now, so I put off bedding in the other blocks 'til later.

Finally, I decided to fill the holes in the port side of the transom, where it's still solid. But that's a whole other entry.

October on Puget Sound is a funny time of the year. The air is typically cold, but the sun shines most days. If you're in the shade, you'll be cold, but out in the sun you're warm and the gold and reds of the fall leaves glow against the dark greens and greys of the firs.

It's a beautiful time for being out in the open, but it's also the time that I have to get our hobby farm ready for the winter. Instead of sails and sheets I have to worry about hog fuel and drain lines, stacking hay and cleaning gutters.

And all this time Odyssey sits at the end of the driveway, nestled up beside the shop. I know it's just my imagination, just me projecting how I feel onto Odyssey, but she seems a little depressed, a little sad about the fact that we won't be heading out onto Possession Sound until next year.

On the other hand, yesterday afternoon when I got home from work I walked down the driveway after shutting the gate, and I looked at my sailboat sitting on her trailer, and I thought "I own a sailboat. How cool is that?"

Fall weather has arrived here on Puget Sound. Mornings are socked in fog, days are damp and rainy, and nights are cold and wet. I don't want to stop sailing, but it's time to put the gear away and plan for the winter's work.

I spent an hour throwing gear over the side of the boat then hauling it into the shop. I helped Dana clear off a gardening shelf so that I had a place to put the gear coming off the Odyssey.

Here's the things I hauled out:

• Sails, sail bags, and sail covers.
• Safety gear (life jackets, throwable float, safety harnesses, flares, horn, manual bilge pump, oar).
• Galley gear (a plastic box of cups, plates, baby wipes, and towels).
• Extra clothes, towels, hats.
• The battery. (A 5Ah battery out of the horse trailer. I'm legal, but not for long.)
• The boom, main sheet and blocks, and boom vang.
• Main and jib halyard, topping lift.
• The whisker pole.
• Ground tackle (anchor, bent on rode, spare rode from under the seat).
• Miscellaneous stuff (the garbage bucket, the earring for the mainsail, a cracker with cheese and salami stuck to it).

Now I just need to cover her up with a tarp and we're good for the winter.