Maiden Voyage

     Well we finally left Canoe Cove today, Canada’s Independence Day!  We ended up with an extra day of grace yesterday. Our neighbors in the marina were going over to Sidney Harbor to watch the fireworks last night, (done a day earlier in Sidney). They said we could pull into their slip for the night if we weren’t ready to leave. We were glad for the extra time and chance to practice coming out of our old slip and moving into our neighbor’s slip/parking place. Also Mike had wanted to clean the mainsail before leaving. It was a perfect day for such a task, hot and sunny. So we scrubbed and rinsed sections of the sail.  It surprise me to no end how all kinds of last minute unforeseen chores popped up with the extra time available. 

      We checked the weather, the tide schedule and  how the currents would be flowing. We had picked out a destination the night before but Mike got the charts out that we would need. We checked fuel and water levels. I had asked Mike to explain everything he could about my role when leaving the slip. It turned out we really needed three people to do it. Luckily our neighbor on the other side of us, (also new to boating and very enthusiastic ) helped us from the shore.I don’t know how we could have done it otherwise. This changing of slips (parking space) was so important for us to do/practice.   It gave us a huge boost to our confidence when we managed to do it successfully. 

       Once we were off, motoring out of the cove, another bright sunny morning, at 2 1/2 knots, it felt wonderful. After spending a week and a half of cleaning the boat and doing some basic maintenance like changing fuel filters on the diesel engine, checking the oil, checking sea strainers, buying as much food as we could fit on the boat (maybe 10 days worth), countless trips to town for this spare part, this extra thing to fix this or that.... I was ready to be doing something else, no matter how difficult. 

Difficult and new, big learning curve, is the way to describe our four hours on the water today. We didn’t go very far, maybe 7 1/2 miles but it felt like 200! There wasn’t any wind so we concentrated on figuring out where we were on the chart, steering a heading with the compass, watching for other boats, especially fairies! We did practice hoisting the mainsail and lowering it. My goodness, I had no idea how much strength it would take to get it up to the top of the mast. It is gigantic compared to our itty bitty day sailer! Actually lowering the sail was harder because it has to fold up kind of like an accordion with help from a sailor. Practice, practice, practice, and it will become easier. Then we had to anchor our boat. Anchoring is surely an art that we will need time to master. We think we got it on our second try. It is 9:15 p.m. and we are still in the same place since 1:30 this afternoon. Mike checks the anchor every couple or hours or so. We are so new at everything to do with sailing we are hyper vigilant. Needless to say we took a longish nap this afternoon. After all, we can set our own pace.