It’s that time of year! No, not the one where Santa visits. The one where the named wind storms head south for winter and therefore, so can we.
We splashed last week. That’s cruiser terminology for going back into the water. If you have 10 mins, watch the full video playlist of MACH 5 moving and because we can’t video ourselves splashing, a video of the boat before us splashing.
If you’d rather see some photos, here’s your chance. First, the team drives the skateboard, shown below, under MACH 5. They put her on the skateboard’s stands and remove the stands she’s been on all summer.
The skateboard is controlled via this “game controller” that one of yard guys wears. It’s pretty cool. He’s an amazing driver!
We are on the boat once they transfer MACH 5 from the skateboard to the travel lift. So I don’t have distance photos of that. Here, tho, is Meriwether, who went before us, being lowered into the harbor. You can see Mark on the left side waiting to hold dock lines. Once a boat is lowered, one person heads below to check for leaks, open seacocks, and pray that everything is cool. The engine is turned on and you hope that works too!
Once the person finds no problems, the slings are lowered further to allow the person at the helm to go into gear and motor out. That was Mark for us. I decided I wanted to do line. The people on land toss the dock lines back onboard. I hurry around to make sure they are fully on deck while Mark motors us 100ft to our slip.
Which is where we still are!
It’s been a week now. We planned to leave later, then earlier, and now, probably Sunday. Why so much back and forth?
Well, originally, we planned to head to AZ a week to park the van for the season. Mark’s dad and stepmom were coming back with us. We’d go sailing. That would have been fun! Then the United States decided to close the border we and thousands of others use. So that’s been fun. That resulted in us hurrying north on Sunday, Dec 4 before the border closed, then returning via Nogales two days later with a local friend. The road between Nogales and Penasco has a couple of cartel spots so we were advised not to stop for a good chunk of the drive. We made it! No issues.
Then we were leaving Monday, Dec 11 with Meriwether and our sailing consultants, SV Totem. However, I decided we needed a rigging inspection as it’s been a minute. One of our spreaders is out of its lock. So here we are still at the dock, waiting on the riggers to finish another job and fix our spreader. Then we go! Currently, weather window shows Sunday, Dec 17.
In the meantime, we’re working on getting 5 months of Sonoran desert sand off and out of the boat. Doing a few simple projects, like new companionway screens to keep the shocking number of flies out. We also had to plan out of 2024 sailing routes for insurance renewal. That’s challenging.
For our second season, we plan to head south–Penasco is at the tipy-top of the Sea of Cortez. Visit the mainland! Hopefully, sync up with friends in the water and on the land. I’m setting the intention to be improve my blogging schedule–feel free to keep me that!