On The Road Again

Watch Episode 44 here! Don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and leave a comment!

Last week, we attempted to leave Cape Canaveral. Just to recap: 1) The weather man lied and the seas were way bigger and on shorter intervals than what PredictWind had told us 2)We almost lost the dinghy 3)After all of that Mom and I voted that we should keep going, dad vetoed that vote 4)We made it back into the channel and snagged a spot on a fuel dock for a couple days. Now that we were back, we had the night to regroup and let the adrenaline leave our bodies, and then we hauled the dinghy out the next day at Scorpion Marine. Let the repairs begin…

I don’t want this to be a step-by-step on how Dad fixed the holes, he goes over the whole process in the video. But, I do want to talk about the cool features he added to her while she was out of the water. He added a Garmin depth sounder/fish finder, underwater lights, courtesy lights, a USB charging port, and a switch panel(this is for the lights and the Garmin). I know that he was really excited about the Garmin and the underwater lights, but what I was really pumped about was the courtesy lights. Being able to see in the dinghy at night is tough, especially when we’re bringing a big load back to the boat with us. The courtesy lights are definitely going to be a big plus for me especially because I’m always the one up at the front hopping out first and in last, and being 100% sure of my footing day or night is very nice.

After the repairs we done, we gave our little baby a wash and dropped her back in the water. Now, we are ready to set sail… again. We were ready to go on a day where NASA had a launch scheduled, so our timing for leaving was completely dictated by the launch. There is a box that is 3 miles (4.8 km) wide and 14 miles (22.5 km) long outstretched from the shoreline, that you MUST be outside of during the specified time window for the launch. If you aren’t outside the box, the US Coast Guard will chase you down and write you a massive ticket. Seeing as how we don’t move very quickly, even on a great day, we didn’t want to even take a chance on being the box during the time frame. So, we made the decision to leave after the “stay out” window which meant that we were going to be doing our first overnight passage on Dauntless. The seas, although not ideal, were absolutely an improvement from our first attempt. The waves and the wind were on our beam, but we were rolling pretty good. As we were pulling up the sails, the reefing lines were tangled at the boom. Dad had to climb up behind the helm and unravel the lines while I steered the boat into the wind pseudo dodging waves to make sure that we didn’t get sideswiped. I ended up making myself pretty nauseous looking at the rooster while steering Dauntless. Needless to say, I didn’t really recover from that experience for the entire trip. Mom ended up getting sick and threw up in the kitchen sink after waking Dad up from a couple hour nap. I stayed up at the helm for the entire 17 hour sail, I refused to move. I found that laying down on the helm seat was better for me because I wasn’t trying to use my energy to support myself in the rolling seas and I could focus on staying awake with Dad and being available to help if needed. And last but certainly not least, Stella did not particularly enjoy her time either. We could tell that she was pretty uncomfortable and feeling under the weather. If you own a pet, you can tell when their behavior isn’t normal, and we could absolutely tell.

In our next video we arrive in St Augustine, so stay tuned for that! Don’t forget to watch Episode 44 if you haven’t already; I will link it again below.

Thanks,

Syd