At one point in my life, the change from spring to summer was heralded by dust storms that covered the countryside for miles at a time, changing to a mud-rain when late afternoon thunderstorms decided to join in the fun. That’s not to mention the tornadoes. Once, the change from summer to fall was marked, not by the usual myriad of natures colors, but by a temperature drop of over ninety degrees in forty five minutes. That’s right, two degrees a minute. It had started with clear skies, no wind and an outside temperature in the seventies. In less than an hour, it had turned to blizzard conditions, winds in the twenties and thirties and a wind chill factor that was measured in increments of how much time it would take to freeze any exposed body parts. This happened on the tenth of September.

My favorite notice of the change between fall and winter was when the Christmas trees went on sale. Folks were walking around in shorts, sandals and tee-shirts, picking out trees that had been harvested thousands of miles away. That year, even Santa Clause wore shorts and I went surfing on Christmas day. Bill and Priscilla Bell probably shopped for their Christmas tree in the exact same place a year or two after my family did.

The point to this is, change is all around us. Some changes are small, some are large. North Florida doesn’t have some of the extreme changes I’ve experienced in some of the places I’ve lived, and I like it like that. It doesn’t bother me that we rarely have snow and ice here. When I lived in Tennessee, it’s true that the fall color changes in the trees was magnificent, but after that ten day period, the yard was four feet deep in leaves that wouldn’t go away by themselves.

My favorite seasonal change occurs at the end of November. It’s the end of Hurricane Season. That usually means that we can stop watching low pressure systems in the Gulf and the Caribbean and start keeping our eyes towards the Northwest for the next cold front to bring stiffer breezes and cooler temperatures. With those stiffer breezes come more pressures on the rig, hull and deck. If it’s true that a single piece of standing rigging on any sailboat should be strong enough to lift the boat it’s rigged to, all that strength may not mean much if you’ve missed a cotter pin that has bailed out, or a circle clip that gave up the ghost, or a lock washer that has failed. Before you go out to test the stronger fall/winter breezes, take another look at all the connectors you can see on your boat. You never know that half the screws have fallen out of the main bulkhead until you look.