Meeting the regular group for coffee tonight at Timmy's. Pull in, feeling pretty good about taking a tight turn at slow speed when all of a sudden the bike slides out to the right. Thanks to a buddy quickly catching it and some cat-like reflexes on my part (I think), no damage.
Pissed me off though...ugh. Not to mention a little shaking of the old confidence to boot...

 

Don't worry about it - lesson learned. When you're off the street, slow & easy, first gear, just above idle, being aware of the conditions, , let everybody hear that Harley lope, you'll be cool.

 

When there's no damage (even if there is), that's just accumulating experience that hopefully keeps us from doing something like that with worse results later. All good riders, even not so good, aren't born that way; getting really good involves a lot of almost gotchas and maybe even a few gotchas. Might shake the confidence right now, but you're just a little better rider for it, will anticipate the condition and respond better if it does happen again. Work your way up with little bits like this, even though unintended, and maybe someday you'll pull out of an unexpected sideways drift with the forks against the stop without falling down - but there would be little chance you would without some "practice", even if it shook your confidence.

 

I almost lost it on my buddys sport bike today because of sand in a parking lot luckily those sport bikes dont weight anything and nothing bad came out of it. I just try to keep the bike as vertical as possible while going slow.

 

did you use the front brake at all before it slid out?

 

First, this was back when Yamaha RD250/350's, Honda 305's, etc. were real popular bikes, and they were pretty simple & rugged, could take laying down with just minor scuffing a lot of times. A lot of guys I rode with then actually liked smooth dirt and sand blown parking lots; we could play around sliding and cutting donuts. If the dirt was right, guys could do donuts upwards of 60mph, sending up quite a rooster tail of dirt. Did we ever lay them down? Hell yeah, you don't do stuff like that without a little bruising in the learning curve. But we didn't have much money invested in the bikes, and were more into fun than keeping them scratch free (mine got aftermarket exhausts, fenders and 3 paint jobs while I had it - not to make it pretty, but to hide/replace damage). It's kind of a shame bikes are so expensive today, and with styling and a lot more ornamentation, they just damage a lot more laying down than the old simple stuff; I wouldn't want to treat any of my current bikes that way if for no other reason it would cost so much. But you sure got some good control experience doing that silly stuff.

 

That just gives you more experience, glad you kept the rubber side down.

 

I don't think that I did. Although I'm rookie enough that it is possible. The boys hanging around who saw it all go down say that it didn't look like I did (noone saw the brakelight come on) and the skid in the sand looked like the tire just slipped; I may have been leaned over too much...

Lesson learned. Thanks everyone for the encouragement.