Twenty Miles

Well, we're anchored up in Half Moon Bay, just twenty miles south of San Francisco, waiting out a few days of high winds before we continue south.

We were so happy to finally leave Alameda... Alisa was dancing on the back deck as we motored away from the marina.

We spent the night in Sausalito - our first night at anchor on Galactic.  The next morning we sailed under the Golden Gate bridge - we on Galactic always put our hands in the air when we go under a bridge.

I was a little blasé about catching the flood tide through the Golden Gate, thinking that conditions on the bar would be pretty mellow even if we didn't get the tide right.

Well, I was wrong. We sailed out into a strong breeze with the ebb tide against the swell, which gave us an hour of putting up with steep waves right on the bow.  Elias was happy about the motion, though a little giddy about it all...

Hmmm... If that clip had loaded correctly, you would have noticed that Eric was looking a little groggy.  He was like that for much of the day - soundly asleep, waking only to eat and then vomit.  At one point Alisa got drenched in vomited-up milk - the romance of sailing with small children!

We're a little concerned that he was showing the classic signs of seasickness - Elias has never been seasick, so we never even considered the possibility that Eric would suffer...  Fingers crossed that it was a one-time thing!

It was a blustery day, and we were very happy with the way that the boat sailed.  There were a lot of bugs of course - things came unlashed; the preventer system I had set up wasn't all that hot; the cook, feeling worse for the motion, took forty minutes to produce top ramen for lunch.  And Elias, who of course hasn't sailed in a year, surprised us by being scared by the rolling motion of the boat.  "It's gonna tip!", he kept saying, sounding very much like someone who didn't sail across the equator before he was two.

So it was a slightly frazzled crew that arrived in Half Moon Bay.  But we're loving the feeling, after all the money and effort that we've expended on this new boat, to be living on the water again, heading somewhere far away.