After what was a beautiful and relaxing wedding in Puglia, we returned to Florence feeling refreshed, a little too well fed, and like we'd hit our spritz quota for the decade. It felt comforting returning to Florence and seeing her safely tied up, patiently awaiting our return, like coming home. Friday morning was our first day back in action with Hozza, so naturally our first order of business was to go back to the chandlery! By the end of the afternoon, we had officially gotten our downwind rig all set up and ready for our next and longest crossing yet - across the notoriously tricky Bay of Biscay. The downwind rig makes use of our double headsail setup, where we can use a large pole to hold the genoa sail in place and then furl out the jib sail on the other side to maximise our sail area for more efficient downwind sailing. Pretty clever! We are excited to see it in action. We celebrated that evening with a cheeky date night at Nando's. Stephen has been threatening to take me to Nando's for a romantic dinner at a "table by the window" since we first started dating 3 years earlier, so it was about time he made good. While there wasn't an aperol spritz in sight, I got a chicken pita for EUR10 so was happy as as clam.
The following day was Stephen's 40th birthday! It was unfortunately also one of our final days of preparation before we left for our Biscay crossing, so the big 4-0 celebration was a bit overshadowed. We are scheduled to slip the lines in Dublin early Monday morning to head south, past the tip of Ireland and England and straight across Biscay, making landfall in Lisbon about 6 days later (hello sunshine!) So regrettably, that didn't leave us much time for the type of birthday celebration I would have liked to throw for my husband. Instead, Stephen got to spend the first 3 hours of the day on his hands and knees wrestling with a faulty drawer in our kitchen (I would venture to say it wasn’t his idea of the perfect day either). As a general rule of thumb on a boat, whenever anything breaks no matter how seemingly trivial, multiply the amount of time and money you think it will take to fix it by at least 4, and you will be getting into the ballpark. Then we moved on to attempt to fix our steaming light, which is a light about 2/3 of the way up the mast to be used when motoring at night. We had gotten away without using it so far but were wary to depart on a 6-day crossing without it functioning properly. This involved me and Stephen hoisting Hozza up the mast in a harness and pulleying him up various tools and spares while he wrestled with the wiring in a fairly stiff breeze. It was your classic "10 minute job," which in boating terms means 3 hours. We followed that up with yet another visit to my favourite place on earth - the chandlery. At the close of what had to have been the least fun birthday ever (as if turning 40 wasn't tough enough), my dear husband needed a break. So I took him for a conciliatory pint at Spoons. We try not to drink the day or two before passages, as it can contribute to sea sickness, but we made an exception for Stephen on his 40th. I really need to make this up to him with a proper celebration when we get to Lisbon…..
The next day was our final day of prep in Dun Laoghaire, and it was quite productive. We did a massive provisioning at Tesco's followed by our first refueling of the boat - not a cheap endeavour to fill the 1,334 litres this boat holds. We then did a bit more parking practice and went out to sea to practice some MOB drills under sail. These were cut short by a big squall that came rushing in that we barely outran, but we managed to get the boat tied up again before the skies opened up. We finished the day with some final weather routing for our trip. It looked as if we would have fairly favourable winds for at least the initial part of our crossing, with 20-30 knots pushing us down the Irish coast and out to sea. My favourite thing about today was that there was no chandlery run! Thank god it's closed on Sundays. If there were ever a reason to become Catholic, that would be it. OK, up early tomorrow for one last check of the weather before slipping the lines. Not that I don't love cold, drizzly weather in June, but I think the whole crew were more than ready to head south in search of sunshine. LISBON OR BUST!
コメント