Marching in to springtime.

The month of March in like a lion part has come true, with strong winds blowing through New Mexico. The good news is that the winds are supposed to moderate this weekend, just in time for the arrival of a class of New Mexico State University sailing students at Elephant Butte Lake on Saturday morning, and a possible Etchells sailboat clinic on Saturday afternoon. Weather will still be cool, so I hope participants are well prepared. Sunday, however, should be milder and should give us very pleasant sailing conditions.

Life is otherwise busy, with a New Mexico Sailing Club meeting tonight. The NMSC, which owns and operates the seasonal Heron Lake Marina, needs to make plans for marina repairs and upgrades and for the coming season. I'm also preparing to take a safe boating instructor class in mid-March down at Elephant Butte Lake. And, I need to get more experience running race committees to complete certification for race management after having taken the training in Houston a few weeks ago.

All that needs to be sandwiched in with the beginning of the spring racing season and the occasional crew shortage when Tad takes his Scout troop camping and everything else going on.

Heron Lake continues to fall as water contractors remove their allotments. Heron is at an elevation of 7,135.30 feet with 163,655 acre feet of water and a depth of about nine feet in the marina basin.

Elephant Butte Lake, as of 10 a.m. today, is at elevation 4,347.00 feet above benchmark (benchmark is about 45 feet above sea level, so the plotted elevations don't readily match topo maps), with 600,173 acre feet. It is up an inch and 1,135 acre feet in the past 24 hours and up 3 inches and 3,406 a.f. in the past 71 hours. Spring pre-irrigation will start soon, so the lake may experience some up-and-down fluctuations before resuming its upward trend in May. By some time in June, the Butte may be another ten feet or so higher than today; then it'll give up that elevation and a bit more during the summer, but still be in good shape for the RGSC fall season races that resume on September 22nd.

On a more bittersweet note, we picked up an urn Tres' ashes from the pet crematory yesterday.
Life's a reach.... and then you gybe.