Our 2nd Day of Sailing

Our 2^nd Sailing Day

Two nights ago there was a raging storm here that lasted from dinner time until around noon the next day.  Captain Marty called us the night before to advise us to “batten down the hatches”. 

We’ve weatherproofed our bimini, but we didn’t think that night would be the best time to test it out.  So we pulled out the tarp and bungeed it down pretty well.  (Neil forgot to completely close the hatch in the bedroom and everything got wet.  We had to pull all the bedding off and put the hairdryer on the mattresses – you get the idea!)

It was our first night entertaining too.  We invited a couple of new friends over for dinner.  Well, that was almost a disaster.  Without going into the whole story, cause it’d take us wayyyy too long to tell it, our propane cut out on us and we sprang a leak in the galley.  But we were able to take care of things long enough to pull off a great dinner.  It was fun sitting in the cockpit watching the storm – and real cozy.  At times it felt like we were going to get blown away and things were very, very noisy.

We lost a grommet (is that what it’s called?) off the tarp and the bungee from the front.  All in all, not bad considering some of our neighbours did worse.

We went sailing today, in much better weather.  We went over 18 nautical miles, almost straight out into the ocean this time.  Quite a difference from the other day in the bay.  Waves were high and large.  We don’t know how to calculate their size yet, but they started at around 3 feet and got bigger as we went out.  It was not like sailing in the bay, which was kind of like sailing in Lake Ontario.  We were moving up and down significantly, but we just kind of rolled over the waves.  A little scary, a little exhilarating. 

We saw many sealions "sun bathing".

 

We both got a bit queasy at times, but we survived.  Neither of the cats likes it when the motor is running, but this time, as soon as we cut the engine, Archie came on deck.  He would have stayed out if we’d let him.  But we’ve removed their halters (they were making a mess of their necks, sores and all).  One of them threw up but we don’t know if it was from being seasick or not, cause cats do that a lot.  Could have been a hairball.

We do have another solution in the works for keeping the cats safe.  We’ve order netting that we’ll attach all around the boat.  Hopefully, none of the cats will consider jumping over it.  The netting is small enough that it will prevent either of them from getting washed overboard.

Sharon fell on her butt when we were taking down the tarp one day and she’s hobbling around like an old lady.  Hurts more than you’d think. Ha ha.

Neil is starting to get comfortable crawling into small tight spaces to fix things.  It’s like practicing for cirque de soleil.  He also got CPR training because Sharon insisted.  Afterall we did have propane leaking into the boat, our Carbon monoxide alarm going off, the aquaalarm going off, dropping a hot frying pan onto the floor having oil in it and burning the mat.  Neil is going to try his hand at woodburning numbers onto a plaque (lets see what happens…haha)

Not much else to report.  Here’s a small video of the marina area.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-GBHXQBus&feature=youtube_gdata