Back in Blue Waters

May 13, 2014:

We woke to a hand-painted pastel sky after our night of UN-rest on the Plaintiff’s Rest.  

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The oldies-but-goodies mixed tape soundtrack of Island Time kept playing through my mind as I put on the kettle for coffee.  “You can’t hiiii-iiide your lying eyes,” as I lit the stove.  “And your smiii-iiille is a thin disguise,” as I pulled out the french press.  Phillip and I felt a little bittersweet to be leaving.  We’d had such a good time in Port St. Joe (twice on this trip!), but we were excited about our last passage.  We kept humming old tunes while we readied the boat, shoved off and headed back out into St. Joseph Bay.

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And, it felt as if the Gulf was calling us back, pulling us out of the bay, back out into blue waters and then gently pushing us home.  The wind was light most of the day, on our stern, but with the following seas we averaged 6.0-6.5 knots most of the day.  Phillip calls it “cooking with Crisco” and it makes me smile every time because I haven’t seen that white lard stuff in years.  It was kind of like a childhood friend growing up.  I remember that nostalgic blue cardboard can with the plastic lid.

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We used to keep it up on the top shelf back home in New Mexico, and my brother and I had to climb on the counter to get it down.  Two scoops of that in the ole’ Fry Daddy and you were ready to fry up anything!  We used to drop in gobs of pancake batter in and let them fry up.  Maybe they call that a funnel cake, I don’t know.  My brother and I called them fry cakes and drizzled them with Hershey’s syrup.   Very un-Paleo.

With the favorable conditions, Phillip and I spent the entire day on a beautiful run, holding the wheel just for sport, spotting dolphins and shrimp boats, munching on fresh, non-fry cake snacks and soaking up every last bit of the denim-blue horizon on our way back to Pensacola.

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We had to motor for just a few hours in the afternoon, but the wind kicked back up around dusk so that we could sail through an exquisite sunset.  It was a bit bittersweet knowing it would be the last time on this trip that we would watch it set on the Gulf.  There’s just something about seeing the vast reach of the sun, when she’s uninhibited and stretching as far as your neck can turn.  It’s like being in an IMAX.

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Phillip took the first night shift and apparently tried to sneak some lady flying friend aboard while I was asleep, but I wasn’t having it.

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“You best find your way off this boat, you hussey!”

We barely had enough time to get two shifts in before the lights of the Pensacola Pass starting to blink on the horizon soon after midnight.  It’s always neat to see that great big lighthouse flash on the horizon, still guiding us in the way it’s done for hundreds of boats before us for hundreds of years.  Kind of makes you want to put down all of your little mobile gadgets and just marvel at the timelessness of it.  While we normally don’t like to come into a Pass at night, this was our Pass, our bay, one we’ve sailed through dozens of times.  This was home.  Even at night, under a puffy moonlit sky, it looked and felt familiar.

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I think my feet first landed on the dock around 2:30 a.m. when I hopped off to tie the first line.  Pensacola.  We had made it back.

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I actually couldn’t believe we’d been gone so long.  Six weeks may seem like a long time to head out on a sailboat, when you’re back at home, planning, plotting and trying to block off the time to do it.  But, when you actually set off to do it … six weeks zips by in the blink of an eye.  It seemed like maybe last week, I’d tossed the last line into the cockpit and we headed out the Pensacola Pass on our way, for the first time, to the Florida Keys.

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But, it wasn’t last week, or the week before.  It was April 3rd, almost six weeks prior.  Sure work was calling.  Sure we had lives to get back to.  But, did we also want to keep going?  Keep cruising?  Of course!  This trip had only solidified what we already knew.  We want to do this.  We love to do this.  We love the work, we love the play, we love the chilly nights on passage, we love the hot bakes on the deck in the sun.  We love it all.  Any time we leave, we’re always going to want to go further and longer.  But, we had certainly gone far and long this time.  All the way to the Keys and back–our first year after buying the boat.  That may seem pretty small time for some, but it seemed like kind of a big deal to us.  While we were glad to be back, big, huge beating chunks of us wanted to stay out there.

After a wobbly walk back to the condo and a quick, dizzying shower, we laid in bed that night replaying a spliced reel of images from the trip.

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For me, having stepped onto a sailboat for the first time only a year prior and just now really learning what it takes to sail and be a capable cruiser and for Phillip, having finally realized his dream of owning his own sailboat and finding a fun, rough-and-tumble mate to sail with him, we were both kind of puffed up by the fact that we had actually sailed our boat, just the two of us, all the way down to the Florida Keys and back within the first year of buying her.  Our minds started to wander to all of the places we wanted to take her next time and all of the things we wanted to do to her to ready her for the next, further-longer trip.  There’s so much more in store for the crew of the Plaintiff’s Rest.  We’re excited to show you everything we’ve done since the invigorating trip to the Keys, the lessons we’ve learned and the places we’ve been since.  We’ll tell you some stories along the way.  And, some truths too.  Stay tuned!

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May 26, 2013 – The Crossing Finale – Best Sail of Our Lives

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The sun peeked up above the horizon around 6:00 a.m. the next morning, finding us stretching and blinking in the cockpit, ready for a big cup of coffee and a crisp morning sail.  We readied the boat, taped up a new catch bin under the transmission and tossed the lines.  The sea that morning was calm and the waves were dancing and playing around the boat, literally pulling us home.  We headed out of the pass at Panama City and set our sights west towards Pensacola.

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To this day, Phillip and I still talk about that sail, with a dreamy look in our eyes, a blissful, breathy sigh and, sometimes, a small salty tear in one eye.  Okay, no tear – those are just allergies – but we always refer to that sail as the “best sail of our life.”  Because it was.  The sea state was calm, 2 to 3 foot waves lulled and pushed our boat, and the water was a soft, denim blue.

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It was a beautiful, sunny May day (not “May Day!” — just a day in May) and we spent most of the morning basking up on the foredeck and watching horizon.

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And please do note here the fancy schmancy trash bag tied to the shroud.  Just so happens we lost the flag with the dinghy (http://havewindwilltravel.com/2013/06/24/april-17-23-2013-the-crossing-chapter-five-a-harrowing-debacle/)and this was our rigged-up wind indicator in the interim: a good old Glad trash bag tied to a pole.  We do get creative on the boat!

At one point we were sitting in the cockpit and Phillip saw a patch of light brown ahead on the water.  He started checking the map and the depth gage to make sure it wasn’t a shoal sticking out that would cause us to run aground (we’re always worried about that damn depth!).  He asked me to go up to the bow and look to see what it was.  As I went forward, I could see the big, brown patch he was talking about but as we neared it, I could tell it was just some dirty, frothy blob of something floating out to sea.  For my environmentally conscious followers out there, I’m sure it wasn’t pollutants, or radio-active at least.  It was just sea junk.  But it was shallow there, about 8 feet and the water was a crystal green, so clear I could see straight through to the bottom.  Just as I was looking down admiring the water, five, six, seven dolphins came swimming up and around the bow of our boat, rolling around on each other, playing, jumping and diving.

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Like a tweenager at a Justin Bieber concert, I started giggling and screaming at the sight of them.  (And know that I had to Google Bieber to make sure I spelled it right – apparently it’s “i” before “e” – that’s just how big a fan I am).   I scared Phillip half to death back in the cockpit, him thinking we were about to run up on a shoal and wreck the whole boat.  But, I quickly assured him, it was just the most amazing sight I’d ever seen – no big deal.  Those dolphins really were something.  I’ve never seen so many swimming around and playing together like that.  As a fun little aside, I now know what I think they were doing, click here if you’re interested: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1132.

While the dolphins were certainly “pleasurable,” the rest of that sail is what Phillip and I are really talking about when we mention the “best sail of our life.”  It was around noon that day, and we’d just had a great lunch, a refreshing drink and were kicked back enjoying the sail when the wind came on us south, southwest at about 10-12 knots.  The sails filled and never moved.  We stayed on that tack for 16 hours.  Six-teen.  We barely had to hold the wheel, the sails were so balanced.

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We set the auto pilot so it could make the centimeter adjustment that was needed every hour,

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All set here Cap’n.  Turn on the “Otto!”

then we moved up to the foredeck picnic style, with snacks, chairs, a book, and just enjoyed life.  Phillip said he had never been a tack that long.  It was incredible.  The sea state started to pick up into the evening,

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but it stayed on the same angle, south southwest, which only meant we went faster, still perfectly balanced, still gliding right along on our path with the helm needing only intermittent supervision.

Around ten, we saw fireworks on the horizon.  Just tiny little dots exploding above the water.

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We thought it might have been Destin, although we weren’t sure, we were so far from shore.  But it didn’t matter where they were coming from, in our minds, they were for us.  Our own little private fireworks show in the middle of the Gulf.

And, the moon that night was exceptional.  It was bigger and brighter than I had ever seen it before, with defined crevices and craters crawling all over it.

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Just amazing.  It felt like we had a beacon spotlight pouring into the cockpit all night long.  We kept turning around out of habit to see what big ass barge was coming up on us with that blinding light.  We felt like those teenagers who got caught fooling around in the backseat in the parking lot when the cop comes up and shines a blinding light through the window.  But, turns out, it was just the moon.  It was shocking how clearly we could see everything.  I could hold up my hand and see every wrinkle (yes, my hands have wrinkles – they work hard) in the middle of the night.  And, it was a little cool so we were wearing our fleeces.  We huddled up with some mugs of hot tea and just sat, letting the sound of the wind blowing through the sails entertain us.  No incessant chatter, no small talk, and especially no freaking Delilah.

We neared Pensacola Pass around 4:00 a.m. and I tell you (aside from the time I jumped off without a line) I’ve never seen Phillip’s eyes light up like that.  He looked like a little boy about to get a big cotton candy at the fair, sticky little fingers outstretched, hopping on one toe.  He was finally home.  Finally in waters he recognized.  I’ll never forget his face when he saw the Pensacola Lighthouse.  And, it really was neat to think this was the same lighthouse that had been bringing sailors into the Pensacola Pass for centuries.

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http://www.pensacolalighthouse.org/index/history/early-history.  That’s right.  That life-saving beacon was built in 1824 (for a smooth $5,000 too!) and has been spinning ever since.  Phillip and I took the tour a while back and really enjoyed it.  The history and building are breath-taking.

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With the lighthouse guiding us, we came into the Pass and started making our way home, having agreed that would forever be the best sail of our lives.  Everything had been so perfect.  Apparently too perfect.  We finally had to pull off of our tack, that beautiful, glorious 16-hour tack, and crank the engine.  Yes, the engine.  The root of all evil!   But it was the first time we’d had to crank it in about a 20-hour passage so all-told, it was worth it for that perfect sail.  But, we had to have the engine to maneuver our way toward the pier.  I went down to check on our catch bin and unfortunately she was filling up quickly.  I know, the damn transmission again – could it BE anything else??  If you recall, in order to dump the “caught” fluid back into the transmission, we had to kill the engine and let her cool for about 10 minutes before I could touch the bolt to the transmission chamber to pour the fluid back in.  Unfortunately, though, we really didn’t have ten minutes of sea to be a-floating through aimlessly.  The wind was not working in our favor in the Bay and we needed the engine to keep us on track toward the entrance to the pier.  We had to have a motor running, but our bin was filling fast.  I was watching it rise to the top, clocking the speed of the drops, and trying to guess how much time we had left.

I hollered up to Phillip, “I think we’ve got about five minutes left on this bottle.”

Phillip hollered back, “We’ve got about ten minutes left to go.”

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