This Thanksgiving I woke up at 6:45am so I could put on all my cold weather bike gear and leave the house by 7:30 on my bike. I was headed to Summit Bicycles to go meet up with a bunch of other mountain bikers for the annual Los Gatos Turkey Ride. That may not be its official name, but the idea is that everyone meets up at 8am to go ride up Kennedy Trail, which has its trail head located half way across Kennedy road in Los Gatos. The trail is a large fire road that is quite steep in some areas, but big enough to allow many bikers to ride at the same time. I was very surprised to see that there were several hundred people at Summit Bicycles so early in the morning, and they were kind enough to have the shop open for business until the ride started, and they provided free breakfast rolls and coffee.

The ride started at 8:15 or so and it took me 1:15 to climb 3000′ to the top in about 7 miles. The very last section of the ride, just before the peak where the party was had a 24% incline and was brutal. This was the first time (out of about 8 attempts) that I’ve actually ridden all the way to to the top without having something go wrong on that section of the hill. That incline is steep enough that a single rock, a chain issue, or anything out of the ordinary will completely throw you off balance and its too steep to start again. At the top, there were turkeys, beer, someone actually hauled a keg up on a bike trailer. Someone carried up an entire cooked pig to share, and there was no shortage of brownies, cookies, and other good thanksgiving food to be shared. Next year i’ll have to bring some food to share. I dont know if I’ll go as far as to carry a trailer on my bike, but we’ll see.

Here is a little video clip from my digital camera.
This was such a fun ride that I will for sure participate next year. I hope that I can get more of my friends to come with me as it would make a huge difference once we were at the top. The whole ride from my house was about 20 miles and the whole trip was about 4 hours long, and I was home in time for thanksgiving with the family, or I would have been if we had plans this year. My mom got sick at the last minute so we had a very low key day.here is a link to the message boards where everyone who participates talks. http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=359615

I setup a new blog today, for use in my e-marketing class at sjsu. The URL is http://lgboatrepair.com check it out. I’ll be blogging there about all my boat related activities.

Over the past two weekends Ive done a lot of work on my Laser. Alfonso came down last weekend and we worked 12+ per day on Friday Saturday and Sunday. Most of my time was spent cleaning up my deck and laying glass. In order to fix the mast step I had to cut a hole in the deck and lay some glass and epoxy around its base. Before I can spray new gel coat on the deck I have to patch that hole and make the deck smooth, then cover the deck with glass. The first photo below is showing the glass lip I attached to the inside of the hole, to hold the piece I cut out. Next was to actually place and level the piece of foam and glass that was cut out of the deck and lay some glass on the seam to seal it in. In the second photo below you can see where the bondo is on the bow section. In this photo I have already laid up two layers of glass over the bondo. earlier in the week I had been putting two layers of glass over the whole deck and cockpit which really strengthened the deck and there is now zero flexibility anywhere on the deck.

Once the glass on the deck was complete it was time to start spraying the hull once again. we put two coats of red gelcoat on the hull a week ago and now it was time for about 5 more. We actually ended up running out of red gel coat before the process was complete so I have to purchase another two gallons. The waterline stripe from its previous gel coat job was showing through even 7 thin layers of gel coat as you can see in the last photo.  I still have a lot of work to do to get this thing ready to sail but the process is nearing completion.  I still need to do some sanding in the cockpit to prepare it for gel coat and then comes the deck gel coat along with non-skid.  After that its just a matter of getting the thing rigged and spraying the foils (centerboard, rudder)

I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/viewplaylist?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC