Greetings all!
I am VERY pleased to report that Sans Souci has now arrived at Roche Harbor Marina in the San Juan Islands (about 20 miles from Victoria Canada).
We need to finish cleaning the boat, and sneak up for dinner before the restaurant closes, so I can’t say much about the journey.
Actually … there isn’t much to say. The last 24 hours were on seas as smooth as smooth can be. There was a bit of wind as we arrived at the marina, but light enough that it wasn’t a factor in parking.
Putting the boat into its slip provided amusement for many people here at the marina. I wanted to bring the boat in, and knew it was a tight place, but didn’t realize exactly how tight. In the picture below you see me standing across from the boat. The tricky part is that there is only 60 feet of water in front of the boat, and the boat is over 70 feet long. My original vision was to drive in backwards, rotate the boat 90 degrees, and back the boat into the space. As I was backing in, It became immediately apparent to everyone in the marina, including me, that this wasn’t going to work. In fact, someone from the marina office came running and shouted up at me: “Is that your slip?” I said “Yes” and he said “We’ll have to find a way to get you a bigger slip. This isn’t going to work.” As you can imagine, this did not greatly add to my confidence level. The boat is incredibly maneuverable, but the slip is incredibly tight.
I am a man who respects and understands his limitations. I gave it a bit more effort, but it was clear that this was going to require someone with more “seasoning”. I asked Jeff, our delivery skipper, to give it a try. He got it into the slip, but also had to work at it. Jeff and I are going to do “practice” tomorrow morning. The goal is to get me comfortable with bringing the boat in and out of the slip. My guess is that it will be easier to get me comfortable than it will the guy in the next slip. He’ll be pouring sweat each time he sees me coming.
The computers have all been shut down, and I’m too tired to fire them back up. All trip stats will have to wait for tomorrow. My sense is that we ran around 1,300 miles, and did it in 5 days and 12 hours. I doubt there are many boats that could have done it faster. I’ll try to compute the fuel efficiency tomorrow, but my guess is that we didn’t do nearly as well over the past couple of days. I wanted into port in the daylight, plus – the engines are supposed to be run hard during break-in.
More tomorrow (or, as soon as I get some free time). For now, a good night’s sleep is all I’m thinking about. Parking school is early tomorrow morning!
-Ken Williams
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