Friday, June 12, 2009

Home-"Oh, this kitchen is as big as the boat!"

We did not get lost on the way from Panama City to home. We left the Municipal Marina @ 12:30 PM, Sunday, May 31 expecting a night sail of 17-hours, with early morning arrival at the Pensacola Channel, June 1. As the chart plotter shows we stretched a 96 nautical mile journey into 130 nautical miles. After three hours of good SW winds, the winds turned west, right on our nose. Both the wind angle and the sea gave a rough ride with little forward progress for the discomfort. So we decided to tack to provide a more comfortable ride. The angle of the tack gave us 3 forward NM progress for each 1 NM of parallel movement. This continued until about 2 AM when our angle improved with slight movement to the NW. As the winds continued to clock to the NW we were able to increase of forward progress to 5 – 6 NM. So our normal 17-hour sail became 24. Sorry to be late in adding this post to the blog. All told this was a fun 3-month adventure. For the summer months we’ll day sail, garden and enjoy some land based travel.

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