For the new people to the forum, I'll recant my tale of meeting Kate, my soon-to-be-wife.

We met during a NC State Sailing Club trip to Masonboro island just south of Wrightsville Beach. We had camped out the night before on the island and had left a JY15 back at the ramp because there was nobody qualified enough to sail it to the island at night in high winds.

So the next morning, We head back to the dock and get the JY15 and the breeze was stiff. I had JUST gotten back into sailing from a 4 year or so absence from it. I felt like proving to the club members that I could handle the boat in the heavy air, and so I volunteered to skipper it down to Masonboro (about a mile or so through the inlet)

Next I needed crew and a cute brunette already had her life jacket on and ready to go. I wasn't about to argue. We push off the dock, and I miss the end of the club's Starwind stern mounted outboard by about 6 inches. As soon as I was in the water I noticed that the tiller was locked, so I look back and saw that whoever rigged the boat in the middle of the night ran the tiller OVER the rope-traveller. So I couldn't feather up and the mainsheet was jammed. We went over 25 feet from the dock. She fell in, and immediately starts swimming away from the boat. Then I noticed that my hat and my sandals that were in the forward hold had come out and were floating down the inlet. She grabbed them, jammed them down the front of her life jacket and swam back to the boat where I was having a hell of a time trying to right the boat.

After a while we got the boat back up and were hauling butt downwind in a little plastic boat. That night I had a couple of brewskis and passed out in her tent (I didn't have a tent of my own, and the night before they stuck me in the "food shelter" tent which was uncomfortable when the dogs started clawing at the tent in the morning). The rest is history.