The other activity I took up while at University was sailing. I loved being on the water and I loved sailing. I started with Lasers at the UW sailing club, graduated to 420”s and 505’s and learned spinnaker sets on an E-scow. I met Brian Williams who got me a ride on fast big boat called Bravado, which was an Islander 40 that was super competitive. We used to go on weekend long races around the Sound. I was the foredeck monkey because I was small and agile, so I handled changing the head sail and the spinnaker and then I was in the cockpit grinding or tailing winches or just being ballast on the high side when we were on a longer leg. Over time I learned how to fly the spinnaker and how to read the shifts and manage the luff of the sail. I also started to pick up on racing tactics especially around the start and during the race as well. I loved racing. We had so many occasions where we were tacking up the beach to avoid the current that we would run aground and have to use the spinnaker pole to push ourselves free. I became masterful at repacking the spinnaker below deck once we rounded the downwind mark.

So I started PT school and was enjoying class a lot. It seemed like I could get interested in PT as a profession. I had my first neuro test, but had forgotten that we had a test scheduled so I came to class super stoned. In those days I was smoking 5 joints a day. I was so high that I totally bombed the test. When the results came out, the teacher called on me to stay after class and she asked me if everything was OK because I was very much active in class and obviously was interested in the material. I told her I was high and she suggested that I stop smoking pot during PT school. About the same time, I had an argument with my dad and he said “Its time for you to stop smoking pot”,

I stopped. It was hard, I had to first smoke less and then gradually stop altogether. It took about 6 months to quit completely. It was hard because all the girls I dated smoked pot. I was playing soccer with a bunch of stoners on a team called Homegrown, and it was literally everywhere. But I worked at it. I had been doing Ti Chi and so I used my Ti Chi practice to distract myself. I remember dong long super slow form walks up the middle of the street at night for study breaks.

The first year and second year kids took some classes together. In one of those classes I met Bobby who told me that her and her husband Roland were going to buy a boat to race. She asked if I would be interested in being a crew on a Thistle. It sounded interesting, so I said “sure”.

i arrived at the dock at Leschi, and there Bobbi and Roland were with the Yellow Bucket. The Thistle is a flat bottom 17 ft long boat with a retractable centerboard and a 30 ft mast with a fractional rig (which means that the head sale and the spinnaker do not go all the way to the top of the mast).

We practiced and practiced and practiced. We practiced mark roundings, sail changes, tacking and jibing and capsizing and righting the boat. We practiced in light air and heavy air. In rain and sun. We were a good team. We raced every Tuesday night through the Summer and Fall and we took the boat down to San Diego for the Midwinter regatta.

In that regatta, there were a couple of experiences I had that were memorable. The first happened in the open ocean off of San Diego during the Olympic Course Regatta. We were sailing under the spinnaker. Now keep in mind that we are really close to the water and the boat is flat as we are going down wind. I glance down and see a massive grey whale heading the other direction right next to our boat about 3 inches below the surface . I put my hand on its back as it went by us and the it dived right behind the boat, its tail fluke being larger than our whole boat. It looked like this…(I didn’t take a picture at the time).

The other event was very stressful. We were sailing on Mission Bay and the breeze was stiff, not heavy, but around 10 knots. One of the things that happens before a start is all the boats jocky for the start. It’s crazy and you have to keep yoru wits about you. We were on a broad reach, which means we are motoring, and, impoirtantly, we were on a port tack. A bot underneath us yelled “Starboard”, which means they have the right of way. Roland had a brain fart, he called “TACK” which means he wanted to get onto a starboard tack. He hardened up intending to put the boat over, but being on a broad reach meant that instead of tacking, we just accelerated as the sail tightened up, and we hit that boat at full speed a mid ships. We broke his rail. He flew a protest flag, and we had to do a 360 (two ciricles) for a penalty. This meant that we missed the start, and were part of the parade.

Funny thing. The guy we hit was a hell of a sailor and managed to WIN THE RAGATTA with a broken boat. It turned out that he had just purchased that boat and wanted Roland to replace it. Roland said, he had insurance. As he and Roland had words, Bobby and trailored the boat for the trip back to Seattle.

We continued to improve and sailed together until I went down to Portland for my clinical internships. At the time, I was dating a girl named Karin who was a year behind me in school, an athletic girl who played basketball. We were just starting to get close as I left for Portland. We lost touch pretty quickly then.