Sea Trials! Itching to go!

Wallace's Sailing Adventure on "Arbella"
Mike and Vicki Wallace
Fri 23 Nov 2012 14:10

While many of the pictures so far show "party" type activity, the reality is our days have been...quite literally...12 hour days filled with detailed preparations for the crossing.  Our boat is well equipped and quite reliable, as demonstrated by our sailing in UK, Channel Islands, and Ireland (remember: worst storm in 25 years to hit Ireland!), but "crossing the pond" is something yet again challenging.  We want to be ready for not just one thing going wrong or breaking, but also reasonable 2nd, and 3rd order problems....because we will likely have NO help when we are 1500 miles from shore on either side of the Atlantic!  So we probably made 20 trips to the chandlery, certainly 4 major provisioning runs, and assorted other gear....in addition to checking and double checking systems and equipment on "Arbella".  This is a really great boat....but it is also really complicated!  The inevitable question is when this "system" fails, what and where is the manual backup, and has it been tested....it feels like putting a power plant through pre-commissioning paces!  So today, we are heading out for the first time as a crew to do sea trials!  As Captain Ron (famous movie) says, "if anything is gonna happen it's gonna happen out there"!  Since George and Oyster were able to update software on our Raymarine system, we also needed to "swing the compass" to recalibrate the electronics.  And we wanted to "fly the kite"....the design of our spinnaker was done by Vicki for our 53 and we repeated it exactly for this boat.  So we donned one of our "uniforms", and headed out....when we returned in the afternoon, Cap out did himself again with yet another fabulous spread for lunch!!  Boy it felt good out there....we are all getting tired of getting prepared to leave!  BUT....the discussion on the docks is now ALL ABOUT THE WEATHER....and it ain't lookin very good....this is going to be a very messy, wet, and challenging sail for the first few days.  Some boats are discussing among themselves the possibility of skipping the "start" on Sunday for 24-36 hours because it is so challenging.  Preparations continue....

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