Pink 'N Blue View : Linda has not pushed me overboard or dropped me on a deserted island

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Linda has not pushed me overboard or dropped me on a deserted island

I Just want to make it clear Linda has not pushed me overboard or dropped me on a deserted island. I haven't blog for the simple fact Linda is doing a great job and it is pure laziness on my part.

To Recap the Blue View

We finally left Turner Marina on a frosty morning and I'm not kidding it was frosty. On the morning of Nov 28th the temperature was below 0C. We released the dock lines early in the morning without fanfare and sadly left our friends Dave and Rita who had just arrived the week before to have some work done on Bliss. As soon as we entered Mobile Bay we had the sails up. We needed to get the wrinkles out of the sails and do some fine tuning with the running rigging. What a feeling to be finally sailing again. The feeling was short lived. After four hours we entered the Intracoastal Waterway. We really wanted to sail in the Gulf of Mexico but the weather was not agreeable. Now remember the worse thing you can have while cruising is a schedule. Well guess what we had! A Schedule! You can call it inexperience, lack of knowledge or just plain dumb. We had made plans to meet Linda's brother and family and our kids in Cuba for Christmas. We had to push through Florida. Don't get me wrong we did some visiting and sightseeing but not as much as we wanted. We found some great and not so great anchoring (Carrabelle) but generally we had a good trip. We picked up a friend in Fort Myers as she needed a

ride to her boat in Cuba and worked our way down to Marathon Florida by Dec 17th. At this point we had a 96 nautical miles crossing to Cuba and we had to wait for a weather window. Remember our kids are supposed to be in Cuba and so is Linda's brother and family. To say things were a little tense Is putting it mildly. This was the first Christmas Linda was away for everybody and it showed. Her moods were, shall I say were less than her cheery self (trying to be politically correct here). While waiting and checking the weather daily we did some chores visited marathon and resupplied DevOcean for Cuba. Finally early on the morning of Dec 23rd there was a small 30 hour usable passage window. Some of you will say "you only have 96 NM to do". Remember this is a sailing vessel and our maximum cruising speed is about six to six and half knots. About a 20 hour crossing. That's if the winds, currents, waves and Neptune are all on your side. Often they are not. This is where Captain Marc had to make a decision, hoping for approval from Admiral Linda. By this time it was ten am. We ran back to DevOcean to get her ready. This was where being the one taking care of Blue Jobs really got crappy. My nemesis the famous fridge has never worked well, but when we sailed part time at home and DevOcean was plugged in all week it was not as big an issue (for me) But here in the hot weather of Florida the constant usage was not so good, on our batteries. I did try to get it fixed at home in Little Current before leaving and in Marathon but that another story (well my story anyway). Finally to get to the point my batteries are not holding the charge anymore and we were leaving for Cuba. Not a good place to get batteries

I dinged back to shore and thanks to Susanne and her car rushed to Napa. I bought four new batteries rushed back to the marina, loaded those heavy suckers on the Dingy, unloaded, change the batteries, reloaded the old batteries and rushed back to the store to exchange the cores. Phew I'm tired again just thinking about it. By the time we sailed away it's 15:00 p.m. and the weather window is even smaller. The winds were not totally on our side and due to the small weather window I decided to motor sail.So I raised the main sail to steady the vessel and motored to keep the speed up.

It was tight but we made it to Varadero Cuba by 10 a.m. Dec 24th. We entered on a sea of glass and the expected heavy winds started blowing around noon.

The kids could not make it to Cuba but Linda's brother and family did. We cleared customs, immigration, health department and the veterinarian department by noonish and were on our way to have a great Christmas.