I’m on vacation, so I started a new blog: Andrea Sails

I think I may be a lost cause. My day job is with Automattic, the company behind the WordPress.com software that I and millions of others use for blogging. I am doing a great job at not working while I’m on vacation: I turned off Slack and email notifications on my phone, ensuring I don’t look at work stuff.

However, I can’t seem to keep myself from blogging.

My husband and I visited family down in Florida for Christmas, and while we are here, he and I took a two-day sailing course: ASA 101, Basic Keelboat Sailing. On day two, our instructor, Captain Sara, encouraged us to keep logs of all of our time on the water. We asked what to log, and she said “Anything! ‘Winds were calm, heard a loon, ran out of gas.’”

Being a writer, I got very excited about the prospect of a log. I even have a new navy blue WordPress Moleskine to use for it. As I wrote out my first entry in ink on a page, the blogger in me kicked in, and I thought “If I blog this, maybe it will help other new sailors.” Plus it will be searchable when I try to remember something years from now and I can’t recall which log book it’s in or what year it happened.

So I created sail.andreabadgley.blog, my online boating log. Most of the entries will likely be sailing, but my husband and kids are building a canoe, so maybe I’ll log those voyages as well. And when I go to my folks’ house in Georgia and go out in their power boat, I’ll ask my dad to teach me some things I never did myself growing up — like docking the boat — and I’ll log those as well. As it will be log entries, and since we won’t be in sailing season when we return home, it won’t be the most exciting blog, but if you’re into boating, I’d love to hang out with you there.

Also, I’m now a certified sailor! Not that that means anything to real sailors, but it’s pretty fun to have passed all the practical tests and the written one as well. The only thing I missed was the difference between a Genoa and a jib (a Genoa is a large jib used for light winds).