(no subject)

Day three, and we are settling in. Finally, we have a chance to dry out the boat and our cloths after the first two days of sailing on the wind. It was quite like Niagara Falls down in the cabin those first two nights. Really, with water pouring below down the leaky hatches, there was water everywhere. I still can't believe it, but I didn't notice the boat came with vents in the hatches that don't seal, so every wave that came aboard, ran down the deck, tripped into the hatch vent and went straight
below. What were they thinking! Poor Al and Leona, they bore the brunt of it, stationed as they were in the main cabin. But now, all that is all behind us. This morning, as the winds went aft we poled out the genoa to starboard, strapped the boom and main sail down to port and have been running wing and wing dead downwind all this glorious afternoon in the sun. The decks have dried, and our spirits have risen. We have shed the foul weather gear and hang about in the cockpit in shorts and smiles.
This is the perfect sailing we hear about, the perfect downwind sled ride the rest of the way to Hawaii, we hope!

Courage comes to mind as I think back those first couple of days and nights. As you can imagine, the prospect of sailing for 2100 miles to Hawaii is daunting. It is made quite a bit worse by the water pouring in, by the sea sickness, by the dark and cold and the howl of the wind. I remember the look of focused, determination on Irena's face, as she went about the grim business of cleaning up the bile, feeling pretty sick herself. Hard to say which is worse: To be on your knees like me, in the dark,
bellowing into a plastic bowl on the cabin floor, or to be the one cleaning up after those that failed to find a suitable container! Neither is easy or much fun. All of us, though, carried on as we needed to do to get the job done, to sail the boat, to feed ourselves, to sleep and get dressed and go back up on deck to stand watch without complaint. What troopers we are! Good on us.

This is the price of admission to this magic kingdom, the kingdom of being at sea on a day such as this. Being willing to get past our initial fears, past our sea sickness until we get our sea legs - this is the price to be paid for what is really worthwhile at sea as in life. If we can bring ourselves to make the jump into the feared and the challenging, we live a better day in the sun.

We are now about 550 miles from San Francisco, and 1600 miles to go to Hawaii. Lots of room for adventure yet!
Out for now
Captain Cresswell