Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Happy Birthday, Martin!

Martin celebrating the big 5-0

We had hoped to be in Tampa to celebrate Martin’s 50th but the weather had other ideas. So Martin spent his birthday sailing Blossom across the gulf. We both decided that this is a fine way to spend a birthday and begin a new decade of adventure J  We’ll have a more formal celebration later this week with Sean & Louise.

Night falling on route to Tampa

This was our first overnight passage with just the two of us. We were looking forward to this milestone as it would be a good indication of how well we’ll manage long range cruising without a third person with us. The passage went very well and we changed up our watch schedule. We like the 3 hour shift schedule when we have three people. This assures that everyone gets a 6 hour chunk of time to rest. This time, we worked on a more natural schedule and stood watch until we got tired. This worked out to us both taking a 5 hour shift to get through the night. We’ve decided this is a good system for us as long as we’re clear that as soon as someone is tired, they call it in.  I imagine that you’d fall into a fairly set routine on a multi-day passage as each person settles in to their own rhythm.

The passage itself went well. We left at first light. It was bumpy for the first 7 hours or so with 2-4, leaning towards 4 and a short frequency it was just up and down. It was too bouncy for me to sew or read without feeling queasy so it was a bit boring. By late afternoon it had calmed down to 1-3 and was easier to move around the boat and read (and type!) We only had two dolphin visit the bow(that we saw). Satellite radio “saves the day” during the night.  We were quite a ways off shore and I was surprised how little traffic we saw. Other than two fishing boats fairly early on, we were alone with Vector for the vast majority of the trip. It was nice to have a buddy boat along with us to chat with throughout the trip.

We arrived this morning in Tampa and are anchored out in the bay...


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