Sailing!..... Finally!
Looking up at our mainsail 9/17/2020
So happy we were finally able to sail again on Thursday. We tried the week before but there was absolutely no wind when we got down to the harbor with our boat. Just a bunch of fog. I guess, even with all of the technology we have today, sometimes the weather is not accurate in it's short term predictions.
We were definitely happy when we finally got out on the water two days ago & there was wind. Things were going well at first. We got up to 6.7 knots of speed. However, Matt, was trying to get his watch tuned in so we could find out how fast we were going & wasn't totally paying attention to our direction & got us into a kelp forest bed. I took over eventually & we still were sailing pretty fast, even in all the kelp. After a while, I thought we should tack & turn around so that we would be able to get back going against the wind in a timely manner. However when I did that we were still in the kelp & it was extremely to make any headway because we were almost sailing into the wind. The seaweed started wrapping itself around our rudder & the boat slowed down A LOT. Then the wind completely died, leaving us in a huge bed of kelp & still far from the harbor. Matt oared for a while with our broken oar; it broke right before we left the dock. And we made extremely little progress. So I gave up on steering or doing anything with the sails. Then low & behold, the wind picked up out of the south & pushed us north towards the harbor! We got to actually practice sailing wing on wing! Talk about serendipity! I'd like to point out that wind rarely, rarely ever blows directly from the south. So I think angels were watching over us. We got pushed out of the kelp eventually & made it back to the dock. We were very lucky.
Heading out of the harbor.
Other things that have been going on in the last few weeks:
The fire closest to us is at 98% containment now. We have blue skies again!
Matt's grandma turned 90 years old yesterday!
And one of my kitchen designs was finally finished! I almost didn't get photos. Only had a half hour to run over & take photos. It was a redo for a small, apartment kitchen. First two photos are before. Butcher block wouldn't have been my 1st choice for countertop but it's what the client wanted. Looks nice but wondering how it's going to hold up. Price for labor, design & products came to around $5,000. Not bad for a simple but classic upgrade to a small kitchen.
Hoping the few other small jobs I have been working on will finish up soon.
That's it for this week. I'm really wanting to post regularly every Friday, (I do realize that today is Saturday), so working on having enough to write about weekly. Still saving for our cruising boat. Still learning as much as we can to become better sailors. Bon voyage 'til next week!
