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With a few days to process our sail to S.F., we have organized our thoughts into a couple of buckets. Our crew, John, Nigel, and Scott were incredible. Patient, committed, good humored, easy-going, amenable, happy, flexible, strong, intelligent, curious, dedicated, and a bunch of other adjectives. I can’t thank them enough, and it was a true pleasure and honor to have their help.

As to the boat, things like sail plan, boat handling, meals, weather, rigging, and systems fill another group of buckets to be processed.

Next, of course we’re trying to figure out our itinerary in the Bay Area, addressing a few projects, and making plans for our trip further down the coast. We’re also still cleaning and re-organizing the boat from passage mode (with five people aboard), back to cruising with two people.

The rest of it is enjoying the here and now of being in Sausalito and enjoying the new locales.

Here are few short thoughts on each area, I’ll probably drop posts about them in the coming days.

Debrief items

The boat overall: “Punched above her weight” is the quote of the trip. One of the locals quipped this one. She handled a rough ocean with a lot of ease, and generally just helped us get through it with minimal drama.

Meals: We did okay. We could do better. Cooking in a gale is near impossible. Below a gale it’s very difficult, it’s extremely tiring. We also have high standards with meals and don’t just want to eat instant food of junk. We’re making upgrades to our stove, other equipment, prep, and menus.

Boat handling: There were a few key moves that we would like to improve. Gybes with the preventer could be made easier. Getting our storm jib rigged an raised could be easier. Getting our storm trysail raised could be easier. We will be addressing each of these through a series of improvements that are aleady in the works.

Sail plan: We liked our sail configuration, mostly double-reefed main and furled genoa (sometimes partially furled, sometimes fully furled). We’re going to make this plan a little more flexible through more practice and experimenting.

Weather forecasting: The combination of weather routing and predict wind worked pretty well. But coming down the Washington, Oregon, California coast is still hairy and scary.

Here and Now items

I’m finding that blogging about “fun” stuff isn’t very “here and now”. In other words, It’s nice to enjoy things and not be too wrapped up in documenting them, for me. So, I’ll be focusing on posting pictures on Instagram to capture the locales we’re at, so with that, if you’d like, follow me on Instagram for that content.

That’s about it for now. We’re enjoying the salty side of Sausalito, and making friends with locals. We’re looking forward to taking my parents for a sail, hanging with friends and family, and getting a bunch of projects done in the next month. It’s looking pretty busy already!