Today was the day to remove the sails and take them to the sailmaker with one question. "Will these make it across an ocean?" Our rigger already pointed out some chafing on the jib halyard all the way at the top, we ordered a new Sampson MLX halyard this stuff is amazing, super low stretch thanks to a Dynema core, it has 12,200 lbs capacity. I went with only the necessary length to hold the jib tight when hoisted on the roller furler. We asked them to splice our old halyard material onto the new so the only part that is loaded is the new stuff. I tried to explain this to the shop where I got the line, they were pretty confused as to why we would do that, they said it was not a load-bearing splice. I explained that at $3.60 ft, it made no sense to spend $360 on line with 50+ feet would be coiled up on the mast in the sun for months at a time. The old halyard is fine and acts as a messenger line to pull the jib up, then the new MLX is the actual halyard. We also got a 'new boat owner' discount at Downwind Marine so it was only $2.46/ft. The only thing I want stretching is our dollars. 
The folks at Quantum Sails have our main and jib to get working on them. Pictures below will tell most of the story. George, Theresa and Christy were amazing. Very knowledgable and they started work on our sails as soon as we left. George Szabo is a rock star in the sailing world, 21 national & North American championships plus a world champion in 2009. They made solid recommendations based on our goals, not their favorite racing setup, which speaks to their integrity and willingness to serve the cruising community. 
Stay tuned on the rest of the story. 

Today I got to teach sailing. 4 nervous and excited people decided that they were going to get certified, so they signed up for the ASA 101 course at Harbor Sailboats. I met with them at 9am and went over their goals, concerns and hopes. Since the main idea is to get on the water and sail, we decided to get going early and headed down to the docks. They all said "let's do this!" That was their team theme, a bunch of go-getter's. Julian was from Lebanon originally, he's in IT consulting and got hooked sailing in the Aegean Sea around Greece, he's also a dive master. Mark is a Corpsman in the Navy and getting out soon, his plans are to get a boat and becoming a liveaboard voyager. I recommended a book called "Get Real, Get Gone. How to become a modern day sea-gypsy and sail away forever." Kim was nicknamed the "Rocket Scientist" since she is graduating from SDSU with an Aerospace Engineering in the Spring. Rob was the most experienced who had sailed in the BVI's and Greece. Initially we had very light wind, so I just gave them the rundown on the boat, rules of the road and finding the wind. By about 11am the wind switched on and we were off! The yehaw's were heard and it was pretty fun. By 12:30 when we pulled in for lunch, the gusts were up to about 15 kts. 3 out of 4 people had some helm time and I showed them how to dock the boat. After lunch, I had them rig the boat, I showed them how to reef the main at the dock, since the front office wants students to reef above 13 kts. We sailed out and started back into the drills. It was a sunny, windy day in San Diego on a Saturday, so we had lot's to discuss about traffic and rules of the road. I asked for a volunteer to dock the boat when we came in and Rob stepped up for a perfect landing, nice and smooth, I hopped off with the boat parallel to the dock, he did better than me at lunch. They secured the boat, rinsed it down and put the covers on. Day one down, well done team! Now to go home and study the materials for the test, "I know it's Saturday night, but you signed up for this." 
Day two was a little cloudy and the wind was blowing lightly from the South. This usually portends to a weather change and I pointed out some clouds as an early sign to weather later in the day. It was written test day. So we sat down for review time, some were really nervous so I answered their questions and we went down to a 40' Beneteau to take the test in the comforts of a very expensive yacht. I wanted them to get a picture of what they could operate if they just applied themselves. 100 questions on all kinds of things and they needed to get 80% to pass. 1 hour later, we're all smiles, everyone passed. Some of the nervous guys only missed a few. So let's go sailing! 
The light Southerly winds got us going and we went into America's Cup harbor to sail the circle around and learn all the points of sail. It just so happened another student boat was in there at the same time. The definition of a race is two sailboats within a mile of each other going the same direction. I told my class that we were going to catch them and pass them. They said, "Let's do this!" it took a while before the other instructor realized that we were on their tail attempting to out-pace and out maneuver them. It was like a racetrack in the harbor rounding the marks and catching puffs and shifts. We had pinched a little hard and got a bad shift and lost them. Unfazed, we clawed our way back and passed them. Each of the students took their turn at racing and it was pretty fun. The other boat gave up and sailed out of the harbor. We sailed back for lunch and another student docked the boat. My job was getting easier as they took ownership of the boat and they secured it without my input. Lunch at 1:15 and I ran back to our boat for a jacket as the rain was looking imminent and secured all our hatches so we did not have any water in the boat. 
The students wanted to get back on the water so we cut lunch short. Kim sailed us out and we went back to do figure 8 drills, tacking and jibing sailing all points of sail in preparation for the man overboard drills later in the day. The guys had all taken turns and Kim was on the helm and we had a pretty hard gust, I said, "That felt kinda squally." About 30 seconds later we were hit with a steady wind of about 20 kts, the boat heeled over really far, but did not bury the rail due to fast response by Mark on the mainsheet. Kim was clearly scared, being on the helm, I was giving her directions from the companion way, letting them deal with the situation as they saw best. I could tell they were a bit scared, not knowing what to do, so I slid up and took the helm with Kim, told her to hang on and we'll bear away and get downwind to regroup. We did and things calmed down on the boat, though we were in a pretty strong wind. So I asked them, "what are our options?" Kim said, "let's roll in the jib" so I said, yeah, great idea, Rob and Julian rolled it up about 1/3 and that helped. So I said, "how about reefing the main?" They said, yes. So I showed them how to heave-to which parks you in a safe balanced place, removes the stress on the main and started to reef, I walked them through the process and sailed out of the heave-to position. They were much more relaxed now and it really started to rain along with the wind. Boats all over the bay were struggling to shorten sail, drop them all together and motor. I shared with the class that if someone is scared, you can't just say, "don't worry, this is no big deal!" being scared is not usually rational, so minimizing the way people feel is not helpful. Kim felt the weight of responsibility of everyone on board being hurt if she messed up. Which is a totally healthy way to view things, after all, my boat my responsibility. We got control of the situation and continued our training with man overboard drills. This is where you throw a life ring overboard and yell, "man overboard" and the job of the skipper is to quickly and safely retrieve them. It's a figure 8 and takes about 2 minutes, most people don't get it on the first try. Rob stepped up after I demonstrated it. A couple of tries and he got him! High fives and cheering all around. Next up and so on. One of the scariest things as a skipper is to lose someone overboard, with this skill down pat, the fear turns to confidence and you can have more fun. By the end, all I could see were smiles on wet soggy faces and a couple said, "this was a great day, we did it!" So getting to about 4pm we headed back to do the outboard training and signing their books certifying them as ASA 101 sailors. They can now take out a 22 foot keelboat by themselves from the club. I offered to sail with each of them if they wanted to have me crew. They took me up on it. I really do love sailing and I love to see people finally understand it too. 

Dock Days 24-26 San Diego, CA 10/26 - 10/28/2016
While we have been away from our house in Redding we have been using our internet data through a little jetpack from Verizon. Several of our devices just decided to download some updates automatically and chewed up a number of gigs. That was very perturbing for sure! What that means is that we seek out free internet and Starbucks is our site of choice. We have spent quite a bit of time there in the past 3 days doing our blog and equipment research for the devices we need to make choices about.

It seems we are shopping every day now for something we are working on! Remember I don’t like shopping? Those who love retail therapy would be in heaven around our world right now! We have been going after some of the big things like faucets and a shower. Tim thinks the faucets are the originals or maybe second generation and they are copper hard plumbed right up to the fixtures! There are no flexible hoses from the copper to the faucet. Tim hates this kind of work and suffered greatly as he worked corroded nuts loose without crushing or crimping the copper. He was a master contortionist in the head as he snaked his body over the head and pump to get his hands, but mostly just one hand, into the small cabinet space. All our faucets are separate hot/cold knobs. Our new ones will be one lever, except the shower.

The shower is a new hose and head that uses a special design to accelerate the water so it comes out with more force with less water. It has a button to stop the water flow so we can take those famous sea showers by first getting soaked and then stop the flow. Next comes shampooing and soaping up, then press the button and the water flow starts again for the rinse. The hose is longer and removable from the wall where the previous one would not have reached over Tim’s head and it didn’t lower down far enough to wash just legs and feet. Our new one was a brilliant find! Oxigenics with Power Pause, they have many other products that look really good too. 

The now new faucet in the head is beautiful! It’s just one lever and the faucet is higher so we can wash our hands under it and I can actually get a wash cloth wet under it. It’s a high efficiency faucet and I’m very pleased. I know in time Tim will be glad he took the massive trouble to change out the old one. This one was practice for the galley faucet which we had to special order today and will wait about a week for it to arrive. It is surprisingly difficult to find fixtures around here! Maybe because there are so many options for people to choose from that stores don’t what to hold much of an inventory?

It seems that we are continually refining our lists! We updated our Amazon wish list with the items we still need and will need to purchase before leaving. Living in this boat world makes things more clear as to needs the more time we spend in it. I’m working on creating a rain catcher, there’s more shopping for that to come. Tim is cleaning off weather stripping and replacing the seals on our top hatches. One out of three is done.

Our Peel Away 7 arrived this week and today I finally had a chance to set up two test areas. I will check them in the morning to see what the dew time is on them. One spot is testing the Cetol that is all over all our beautiful teak. Tim also calls it evil. Its manufactured by Sikkens, and it really is a sick product that turns orange and cracks off. The second spot is for the paint that is on our teak window trim. What is Peel Away you ask? You might want to just google it yourself. I used it in the early 2000's in our Victorian house to strip away 12 layers of old paint off the beautiful fir mouldings in quick and clean fashion. It is painted on nice and thick, then a vapor barrier paper is applied to cover it while it goes to work. After 24 hours I came back and using a plastic scraper to lift off the paper and paint all together and voila! I’m truly hoping this works much the same for us here! That means no sanding or scraping, a novel thought right? You can be sure there will be pictures as we do this. We have a lot of wood on and in our boat. This product is a green biodegradable product.

For me, while Tim was working on the new faucet in the head, I was the labeling queen. Tim asked for me to label where things are so when we pull back a cushion, Tim and I will know which compartment to open to find the item. I placed the labels in the respective area of the cover that corresponds to the location of the item in the compartment. I also identified a number of things that I am not going to keep on the boat and they have been removed to the car. Several bags and two pairs of sandals that will not hold up to use in this environment. Now I only have 11 pairs of footwear on the boat! I know you are thinking that is a lot! Here’s my list: slippers, shower shoes, Toms, deck shoes, Keen water/deck shoes, tennis shoes, mary janes, ankle boots, hiking shoes, sandals and my weather boots. Tim has slippers, sandals, deck shoes, water shoes, hiking boots, dress shoes, comfy shoes, and weather boots. That’s 8 pairs for Tim. Sometimes I get irritated that women have so many additional clothing items to work with or have need of. If I had my way, I’d just dress like a guy, but some of the places we will be going to expect that women will wear a dress and not pants. I need pants for the boat living as a dress everyday is not practical.

I have a chore that I am irritated that I have not completed yet: waterproofing the dodger. It has to be dry and we’ve been experiencing heavy dew at night and I have to do it when the wind is not blowing. Maybe tomorrow? I’d like to get this off my list! 

Tim crewed on another boat in the middle of these days. While he was doing that I wrote on the blog and took a long walk between the loads of laundry. I also cleaned up the cabin down below.  The To Do List is shrinking! Yay!

After having raced for most of my sailing career it's funny how you change. Getting our cruising boat, a 17,000 lbs modified full-keel boat, designed to keep you comfortable at sea was a good choice for sure. Then yesterday I went out on a friends all-out racing boat, a customized Schock 35 with very few amenities and carbon fiber everything, sails, tiller and toilet seat. The boat weighs 10,000 lbs total, with more sail area than ours. Pictures below and a couple videos show the difference between the ride on our boat and the same sized racing boat. We're reaching along in almost 16 knots of wind doing 8 knots of boat speed, a full knot faster than ours in the same conditions. The top video is the speed and motion above, then the 2nd video is the experience down below. The noise is quite loud plus getting thrown around down below, I bet Lynette would not sign up for that. I asked her "Aren't you glad I did not convince you to get a racing boat?" 
Just doing the basics on our boat can be difficult when in the ocean, the rocking and rolling is significant. In bigger seas ours does really well, the racing boat down below can be dangerous where you can fall across the cabin and break something. The owner said he came very close to getting hurt yesterday. People were amazed that I could simply go to the head (toilet) yesterday, the one lady that was with us saw no possible way for her to relieve herself under the conditions. Which by the way was a very mild day on the ocean, 3-5 foot swells that were 20-30 seconds apart and 1-2 foot wind waves and the wind blowing from 10-15 kts. The British sailors never get a day this nice.