And We’re Off! - Finally!: October 1st, 2023
Leaving Santa Cruz Harbor
Yes! We have left Santa Cruz! OMG! So crazy! We’re in Monterey right now & I don’t know if it’s really hit us yet that we won’t be seeing Santa Cruz for 6 months!
Some last moments in Santa Cruz:
We left at 10 AM this morning. The waves sent us off during the whole way over with 7 foot swells. -Too bad they were mostly abeam of our boat. And unfortunately there wasn’t any wind when we started. So, not the loveliest start to the day but we were actually leaving!
Matt got sick, about 2 hours in, he needed to sleep for the rest of the way. And then Harriet, our auto-pilot started acting weird. She would work great for a while & then not want to go to starboard. Wondering if it had to do something with the swell or if something was a little off in the way we set here up in the morning, or if she’s just getting old. Therefore, I steered by hand & it wasn’t too bad.
The sun did eventually come all the way out & the wind came up to about 9 knots. However, being single-handed at the moment with a fussy auto-pilot, I wasn’t able to get out a sail.
We docked MerSea right at 3 PM. And then it was time to relax, right? No. It was time to have a few nibbles & work on stuff that we didn’t get to before leaving & to try & figure out a few things.
On a fun note, we met Chad, another Baja Ha-Haer, on his boat, Wayfinder. It’s a beautiful Jeanneau 53. He came down all the way from Canada! He was actually in Santa Cruz but we didn’t meet him until sharing a dock today. Chad is sailing his boat pretty much single-handedly while his family joins him driving port to port. Very impressive!
Matt dove in the water to take a look at MerSea’s bottom. She’s a dirty girl. He found out that yes, a hull cleaning is in store for the near future.
And now we’ve both showered, took Zephyr on walk & currently are staring at our computers. Although, I might be ready to get things a little cleaned up around here & come back to this tomorrow to tidy this post up.
First leg of voyage, done!
So yes, I am going to stop it there. I need to schedule this blog post to get out while we have access to the wonderful world of internet. -This is where planning ahead is very much needed. I’ll let the anticipation fill you up until next week!
But one shoutout I want to make, before I sign off, is that we want to thank Matthew V. for his send-off the night before we left! Thank you for your generous gifts of a GoPro Camera!, a sailing watch!, & a diving knife! Too generous of you! Matt & I appreciate you & all your help! Thank you! Thank you!
I’ll even take the helm. I’m just waiting for us to go!
Thanks for reading! Come back next week to see if we ended up deciding that we’ve had enough for a while & are going to hang out in Monterey or if we are going to sail a “do-over” from last year down the Big Sur Coast.
