Week 5 - Day 6 - 867 days to go

Ganges to Russell Island. 7 hours, 18.1 nautical miles

Normally, this trip would be a lot shorter.  However the whole crew decided to detour over to Montague Harbour for lunch.  The detour added on a bunch of time and miles to this, but it was fun.  We sailed a lot of the distance, which is the main reason we're all sailors, rather than listen to and smell that stinky and noisy engine growling at the back of the boat.

Upon reaching Montague Harbor, we pulled up to a mooring ball to tie up temporarily.  Normally you fish up the ring from the mooring ball with a boat hook.  However, we discovered that some time during the journey, our boathook has gone missing, possibly overboard.  There are a couple of solutions that are generally accepted procedures in this case, and we invented (I'm sure others have done it this way too, actually) another: Our helmsman pulled up close enough so that someone with Gorilla Arms(tm) [i.e. me] could reach down from the deck and just grab the ring, pulling it aboard.  After that it's just a matter of slipping a line through the ring, fastening the line at each end to cleats on the deck of the boat and allow the ring retract back down to the water.  A lovely relaxing time was had and then we slipped off and headed to Russell Island.

We got some more sailing in and then motored the rest of the way to the anchorage on the north side of it.

The anchorage at Russell Island is not normally recommended by me for overnight anchoring, but the weather reports predicted a pretty calm night.  Upon arrival, it was somewhat crowded, but we found a place to drop anchor, set an anchor watch, and then have dinner.

Overnight the wind picked up and we started to bob a bit in the resulting chop.  After two weeks on the boat, I actually found the motion restful and enjoyable except for the boom swinging back and forth.  The main sheet would stretch a bit and pay through the blocks, snagging for a moment and then releasing with a "prang!" sound.  It didn't take much of this before three of us, simultaneously, decided to get up and do something about it, eventually lashing the boom with a second line off to the side to that it wouldn't swing back and forth anymore.