The race begins on Friday, April 26 from St. Petersburg, Florida. By water, from my house it is 96 miles. I decided that in order to bring the boat up, we should do a night sail to do some team building with the crew and to shake down the boat to see if all of the safety changes done over the last year work as expected. We left Sunday evening, planning on arriving Monday morning so we could make any repairs if any were needed.
We left the dock at 3:45 PM and motor sailed to Boca Grande. We got there at just about 7 PM as expected. We put a double reef in the main before we went through Squash Cut which s a very narrow unmarked passage by Boca Grande that would take an hour off of our trip.
We settled into our watches with Jake Dye and I on the first watch and Al Alexander and Don McAlpine taking the next. The wind was pretty much on the nose and we motor sailed with the jib rolled up for the 1st two hours. The waves we against us and we pounded quite a bit. The last hour of our watch, the wind clocked around and we unrolled the jib, cut the engine and sailed along quite nicely until we passed along the helm to the next watch.
The winds kept building up to about 20 kits during the night and continued to clock around. Don and Al decided to roll up the jib. There appeared to be some sort of snafu and the jib sheets got mixed up with the sail and it would not come in. Jake and I came to the deck to help out. Did I mention that it was pouring rain and that there was lightening all around. It seemed to take hours but I am sure it was less, but at around 12:30 AM we got it all sorted out and the rest of the sail was uneventful into St. Pete.
We did find that the gas line that connected the new propane
