This weekend was fun, we had a very good time on Friday hanging out with some friends in Seabrook. Such a good time, we did NOT go sailing on Saturday ;-)
We did, however, go sailing on Sunday, and it was wonderful! We started off the same as last time, got out into the bay, raised the main, unfurled the jib, and just started working on trimming the sails properly. We were focusing on the helm this time - trying to remove the weather helm and the lee helm and make it happy to stay forward - we did a pretty good job on the close reach and the beam reach, but we definitely need some more studying on how to do that on a broad reach.
We got much higher winds this time, and we installed a heel indicator so we could actually see how much we were heeling. Winds were about 10-12 kts, gusting to 15. We hit our new top speed of 7.1 kts! We were doing about 20 degrees of heel, which feels a little crazy when you aren't used to it, even though you know the boat is fine!
Here is a little compilation video of some snippets I took while were out on Sunday:
This week has been mostly small stuff. We spent some time on Monday looking at places nearby to live. We plan to do a bit more of that tomorrow. We did get part of our bimini fixed up - one seam had ripped, and there was a worn section, so we took it to some friends who do great canvas work (look up Bill and Stephanie in HarborWalk marina if you need canvas work!), and found that almost every seam on the thing was bad! Thankfully they fixed it all up and we are back to a solid bimini.
We also finally got safety gates installed and new lifelines!!! We are so excited - we no longer have to climb onto the boat, now you can gently step onto it. Thank you Stix N' Rig'n for squeezing us in and knocking that out. It is the small things in life that really make a difference ;-)
Aside from that, we registered the boat, and ran a couple errands, but nothing too stressful.
So, why am I excited about next week? Four amazing words - Michael is on vacation! We are planning to spend the whole week at the boat, take it out sailing a few times, try our hand at anchoring overnight at least once, and just generally have a great time together. Bean's birthday is next week too, so we'll be celebrating that out on the water, having a great time. It feels so good to have done the work to be able to do these things now, to be gaining experience, and just be having fun.
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