Well, a horrendous drive down. Google is apparently not very good at estimating morning rush hour traffic. It estimated 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. 3 hours on the road and I wasn’t there yet. Oh well.
Today is the first day of our second Quijote training trip. In a little bit more than 2 months from now we’ll be setting forth on our 2500 nautical mile trip southwards. You can see the Teddy Bear moving into the V-Berth which he'll share with me for the next few days.
On this trip is Rod and Kay, two of the three other people that were on the first training trip, and Tina. Tina, unfortunately, isn’t feeling well, but she’s delightful company even when ill.
We had a bit of a wait before we could get through the locks, hanging out for over an hour while they let commercial traffic through, and then picking Tina up at a marina. The wind was blowing above the prediction, which is a new experience for me. Normally winds are well below what the weather service predicts.
Sailing was good, with water speeds between 3.5 and 6 knots beating into the wind before turning downwind to our first night’s stopover mooring. Meanwhile we futzed about with the storm trysail and storm staysail, figuring out our procedures for deploying and dousing them. The rest of the day was easy cruising to the night’s mooring.
There was some excitement when our helm accidentally had the boat in reverse while we were trying to thread the line through the ring of the mooring ball, almost pulling me off the boat as I couldn’t get the boat hook unhooked from the ring and was loathe to let it go to watch it sink to the bottom.
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