Rising with the sun, I had a lot to finish today before the dock “Checkout” time at noon. Apart from the cleaning and storing tasks, I needed to make another run to the stores for provisioning, to return the rental car, perform the time-consuming checkout from the Marina and get out of the slip before the next tenant showed up. The coffee from my Nespresso machine got me going and the second provisioning run was relatively quick as I’d prepared a shopping list ahead of time. The only painful part was paying the bill, but I think I’m all set up now and won’t need to hit a grocery store for a while. I do have enough flour to bake a lot of bread (a 5 pound bag was the smallest I could find).
Andrew’s boat had arrived and he transferred his bags aboard, and helped me to get off the dock. The winds were light in the marina, so I was able to get all the fenders and lines inboard before heading off to the waters of the Sir Francis Drake passage. At first I used raised a furled genoa, but soon I added a furled mainsail for my trip to Norman Island and made a good 5-6 knots while I coiled the docklines and put the fenders into the garage. This time getting underway again was easy, it was as if I’d hardly left the boat and didn’t have to use my checklists or check which color lines did which task.
I’m anchored on the northern section of the Bight in 30 feet of water. I did most of the work from the cockpit and was shocked when I went forward, as there was a huge pile of rust that had flaked off the links of my chain. After almost being hit by a commercial catamaran skipper who hadn’t been paying attention and/or had thought I was motoring away I made sure to get my black day shape hoisted to avoid another near collision. Then came the task of trying to get the rust flakes overboard without staining large areas of fiberglass, a difficult task as the gusting wind was doing it’s best in distributing the rust pile evenly across the decks.
After anchoring, I relaxed in the cockpit for the first, but certainly not the last, time this trip and did quite a bit of absolutely nothing until dinner time came around. The Magma BBQ is looking worse for wear but still functioned sufficiently to give me a nice steak and baked potato!
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