Help! The sailors are coming to town! It's January and the amateur boat owners and their professional crews of the Southern Ocean Racing Conference are littering our streets with their boats and trailers and massive trucks. They've taken over the Outer Mole and Truman Annex parking area and are exposing themselves en masse to our weak January rays. Unlike the inappropriate tourists paddling in the freezing 77 degree sunlit waters, these sailors are busy maneuvering trailers: 
maintaining the hulls:
and hoisting themselves aloft to reeve halyards and secure tangs:
Filling the lot with lumps of gray and white, like beached whales, and totally unlike the individual and sometimes eccentric lines of cruising sailboats:
Busy, busy stuff, which is all very well and good but it has impacts, you know, all this busyness. I don't want to sound whiny or anything but our town is now filled with burly sailors and while that may make many a gay heart flutter, as it did years ago apparently, when the Navy loosed hundreds of lonely sailors on the city nightly, for those us us trying to live well regulated lives these sailors are a damned nuisance.
City residents more often gripe about Bike Week and loud motorcycle mufflers, or Lezzie Week when the city fills with women holding hands, but personally Race Week troubles me. Not least because, as a former cruising sailor, everyone expects me to be interested in the antics of a bunch of pituitary cases loose on the water, but also because too many islanders don't know the first thing about sailing and they expect me to know about racing. Aside from the fact that I couldn't care less about racing, I couldn't care more about the long slow lines on the roads and streets as boats come and go with all their protrusions and extrusions laid unnaturally horizontal.
Which, when they are left vertical even I have to admit they have somewhat slightly poetic lines, as they soar above the ugly, slab-like raceboats.
But also because this is the week my wife has her birthday and finally after years of pretending to ignore the problem we have to come out of the closet and admit it. No matter how much money the city at large earns from Race Week we absolutely hate the fact we can't go out for a quiet tete-a-tete and have dinner together somewhere nice, because every bloody eatery is packed with loud obnoxious sailors using bread and wine bottles to illustrates the day's idiocy (tactics they call them) carried out on our beautiful winter turquoise waters.
Really, couldn't they just move race Week to say, early February and let us celebrate the passing of the years together with a nice, quiet meal out?
Am I a fuddy-duddy or what?