We left Port Townsend at 0950 yesterday morning and are setting our sights northward. We motored till clear of PT and hoisted the sails. 8 maybe 10 knots of wind. Not much but enough to keep us moving. Primarily from the Southeast, it slowly shoved us along missing tugs with barges and container ships.
With the wind behind us, we jibed a good bit. For all you landlubbers out there, this means to put the stern of the boat through the angle of the wind instead of the bow. As you change course going downwind, you slowly pull the mainsail and boom inward till it crosses the center of the boat just as the wind changes from being off the starboard side to the port side or vice versa. Then you let out the boom with it's mainsail and it fill with the air from behind you and off you go. Not really tough but it can take some practice to get the timing right. Back and forth we went making about 3 knots. Far from whizzing along but at least we were out sailing. This was the first time we have had the sails up and really making progress since late last year.
Snoeshoe came up on deck for a walk around the deck and then went below for a snooze. He had enough exercise for the day. Blue came up, looked around and headed below. Shadow just slept--smart cat.
By 1400 hours, at the speed we were going--wind had dropped to just about 0, we started up the engine and motored the rest of the way. We're currently at Watmough Bay--for you Google Earth folks--48 25.5567N 122 48.3756W will put you just about on us. We expect to spend a day or two here "resting" up from our big day yesterday. Having been relatively sedentary for the past months--no sailing--we area bit sore from all the stretching, ups and downs, ins and outs that were required of us during our sail. Our bodies have to adjust. I told Tracy that we would be having exercises on the Lido Deck this afternoon. That was met by a large groan and a chuckle. Like that is really going to happen.
The only problem that occurred was that the anchor didn't want to play out when we arrived here. While I had washed it off with a hose after our last journey, some of the mud and stuff had gotten down into the moving wheels and it was not about to spin free and let the anchor out. I pulled and yanked and it finally broke free. Once we were anchored, I partially took it apart and sprayed it with WD40 but plan of dismantling it today for a proper greasing. While is may have looked clean, it wasn't. Lesson learned. Clean it properly and it won't happen again. Of course, we don't plan of having such a long spell between anchoring again for quite some time.
We'll be launching our water taxi(dingy) this afternoon and row ashore. No reason for the outboard I think. It's not that far. A hike and some exploring are the call of the day.
We're finally out and we're not going back hopefully for quite some time. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the "comment" section and I'll post the answers as soon as I can.
Have a great weekend everyone. We are finally!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment