It was a perfect day for sailing…

“A Perfect Day”   2.5” x 3.5”   Pastel   $20  © Sharon Lewis
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It’s a sunny, windy day here… a perfect day for sailing.  It’s great to be out on a sailboat with the wind blowing just hard enough to make you feel like you’re almost flying over the water but not so much that you’re worried about flipping over.

Today’s painting is from a photo I took one summer of sailboats in the Boston Harbor.  When I painted this I was reminded of a day that two of my brothers and I took a sunfish (a small sailboat) out on the intracoastal waterway near our home in southern Florida. It was a windy day and none of us were experienced sailors. In addition, the sunfish was really only big enough for one person and we were trying to fit all three of us on it at the same time. Even though we were 3 fairly skinny kids, this was just not working. The problem was as soon as we’d get all three of us on board, one of us would fall off. As soon as we got that sibling back on, another one of us would fall off. And so it went, with all three of us laughing so hard that it made it even harder to climb back on and so much easier to slide right back off. At some point we glanced over at the shoreline and unfortunately saw a police officer standing there who motioned us sternly to come back to shore. Apparently we weren’t supposed to be swimming or sailing there. Well, we immediately thought the worst…we were going to arrested… we were going to jail… or worse… they were going to tell our Dad!  However, after a few minutes of watching us continually fall off the sunfish and our total lack of progress towards shore, the officer starting laughing so hard he was bent over and holding his stomach. He eventually waved us off, like, “You guys are hopeless!” Or maybe, “It’s going to take you all 3 hours to make it back in and I don’t want to wait that long!” I like to think now that maybe he let us off because he remembered being young once and decided to be kind. Whatever he was thinking, I remember that it was a perfect day for sailing…or whatever it was that we were doing with that sunfish.