It must be Memorial Day

You could just about walk across Puget Sound from deck to deck on all the boats out there.

As has become traditional with this blog, I offer you my apologies and protestations of sincerity regarding the continuing absence of up-to-date pictures. They're getting closer, though; the camera actually made it as far as the boat today... and there it sits. I'll pick it, and the pictures it contains, up within the next few days or so, I imagine.

Anyway, it was a beautiful day and we decided to take full advantage of it along with the hundreds of other boaters out for the three-day weekend. Mandy had to work in the morning, but that gave me a chance to get down to the marina and re-assemble the interior of the boat after all the spring projects I have recently detailed.

The new button starter worked like a charm and the Yanmar fired right up. I managed to catch all the rigging oddities (jibsheets were led through the bow pulpit for some reason... there is always something messed up on the first outing of the year) before we left the dock and there was a nice breeze coming out of the north, so we didn't actually run the engine that long. We got outside the breakwater and raised sail off Golden Gardens and had a brisk run on a beam reach across the Port Madison. Conditions were great; we made 5-6 knots in the 10-15 knot breeze but the water was flat and relatively calm. Bright sunshine reflected off the crisp white sails and kept us warm even in the wind.

The wind got fluky once we got into Port Madison and we baubled around there for an hour or so tacking our way back out in the shifts. Then it was another beam reach back the Shilshole.

The only downside was all the other traffic, particularly close to the marina. No close calls or even any annoyances, really, but we had to pay more attention to where we were going and what we were doing than I would have preferred for a truly relaxing day.

We were only out for about three hours total but it was actually just about right for our first outing of the season. A nice shakedown, everything worked as it was supposed to and performance was good.

I didn't get a chance to properly mount the start button, but I did scrub the deck down after we got back... a task long overdue, particularly after the winter at Shilshole: the marina is adjacent to a heavily traveled set of train tracks and a layer of black grim accumulates much faster than when we were moored on Lake Union. I managed to knock loose the GPS antenna while I was scrubbing but it was a temporary mount in the first place--I wanted to get a sense of how it would work in that location, and I am happy enough with it that I will put in a more permanent fixture now.

There were actually a lot of things that didn't get done today, but I'm so happy that everything else that has been done is working so well that I didn't mind much. I'll get back to it sometime this week as long as the weather holds out.

After finishing up with the outstanding systems projects, I need to take a serious look at stowage. After sinking last year, we've made a serious move toward storing important items in dryboxes and dry bags, which is going to change our lading plans... to store the same volume of stuff will require more space with it in dryboxes and bags, so I'll have to re-arrange things substantially. Also, the items damaged and discarded have freed up spots in lockers that were previously carefully arranged in an intricate 3D jigsaw puzzle that depended on every particular piece of equipment in its particular place. While on balance this is a good thing (many of the items lost were inherited with the boat and of questionable value... an old car charger, random buckets of wiring, petrified tubes of sealants) and gives us more room, it also means the puzzles have to be assembled again to fit the new stuff. I'll probably need to buy some more containers of various sizes to fill in the voids.

So that's the next big thing, I imagine, but at least it's more of a brain teaser than a physical job, and I don't have to wait for good weather to do it.