Free at Last…

Sipping a drink in the cockpit at anchor last night while watching the sun go down, reading to the kids in a small pool of light in the saloon, waking up at anchor. After months of hard work and aggravation I finally get reminded of why I put myself through this.

Admittedly, we’re not all that far from home. Dutch Harbor in Jamestown to be exact – less than two hours away. But it makes all the difference.

The original plan was to get the boat inhabitable on the mooring Friday night, then get up Saturday and bend on the sails leaving for someplace close after a leisurely morning. Getting the main sail on was the ordeal du jour, it just would not go on. We ended up getting some help from our rigger, hoisting up the mast to apply some Sailkote to the luff track. Too much friction is the cause of so many evils on a boat. We finally got under way around 3:30 in the afternoon. Leisurely breakfast, bolted lunch while trying to solve the puzzle of the main sail.

Today we plan to figure out what’s HERE at Dutch Harbor, it’s always been simply an overnight stopping point on the way to somewhere else and we’ve never actually gotten of the boat here. Allegedly there is a dinghy dock and a cookout area somewhere and it’s not too far of a walk into Jamestown.

And of course, we finally get the answer to the question we’ve been waiting for since January – can the new dinghy engine get all four of us up on a plane!