Letters
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
from Your Seattle North Sails Team
Looking forward to a great 2011 with our customers.
Angus, Ann, Brian, Jack, Jeff & Kerry
Mariners Square above Fisheries Supply Hours: M-F 9am - 6pm
www.northsails.com • (206) 632-5753 48° NORTH, DECEMBER 2010 PAGE 12
It’s the unknown that appears scary in spite of any rational understanding of the odds. Our voyage is not risk free, but we have carefully stacked the deck in our favor with meticulous planning, a stout vessel and a bucketful of luck. November 1, We blew down the Chesapeake Bay in three legs: Annapolis to Solomons; Solomons to Deltaville; and Deltaville to Portsmouth, VA. Love those northerly and westerly winds. It sure conserves fuel. November 14, A few days ago we pulled into Jacksonville for a splash of fuel and to drop off Bob near his home. Unhappily, he couldn’t recover from his seasickness and now we are continuing with a crew of three. Far offshore we are at the mercy of the sea wilderness. For the next two days/nights we hardly see another ship on the horizon, yet we have our amusement built in. Along the way we greet a pod of 20 or so dolphins who play with us for several hours. They race alongside at our speed and poke their heads up to observe our curious life form. Now that they have an audience they delight in showing off their athleticism. They make up a game of leaping across our bow, seemingly challenging each other to a game of “double dare.” We wish we could play with them. Nature’s wonder is our companion. We have sailed by a star and seen the Milky Way painted across the sky. We have watched shooting stars paint their stripes across the sky. One evening the moon was directly ahead and we traveled south, guided by a moonbeam on the water. The next day I had the thrill of surfing a 19,000 pound boat down waves in a quartering following sea. Randomly, a 12-foot rogue wave would appear from behind and lift the stern and send our Little Star down the wave like a surfer. The boat would accelerate (sometimes to 10 knots when 7 is our normal best speed) down the wave, and the bow would plunge into the trough, putting the brakes on our speed with the loud “whhoooooooosh” of tons of water being displaced and frothing off of the hull. We would slow to 6 knots and then pick up speed and wait for the next series of waves. Thus we hobby-horsed along, amidst these waves that have traveled 600 miles from a Bermuda low to greet us.
Our moments of delight have come with a cost: the
wearing of rocking seas and growing sleep deprivation. We require two persons on deck during night hours and hand steering in theses lumpy following seas requires constant focus. Both Bill and I reached moments of hallucinating (this is a common event and not a serious threat to health). We compared our images and Bill thought his were better than mine. I guess we all treasure our imaginations. Yesterday afternoon (since I have no idea what day
it is) we rocked into Fort Pierce Inlet (Florida) for a well- earned respite. We are at a slip about 40 yards from the Tiki Bar, where last night Ernie Southern delighted us on
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