Spill The Wine Sailing

  One more to go…. To Charleston.   Can’t Wait.   The yacht has performed perfectly…. Even in some pretty tricky weather.    Here are a few quick highlights:   Day two: I caught a fish… a beautiful black fin tuna.   Barb cooked it perfectly and all three of us couldn’t finish all that was on our plate. Yum.   We made good miles from Miami to Lake Worth.     Day Three & Four: We sailed out to the Gulf Stream to pick up the current…. Found the speedometer registering 10 sometimes 11….   Night started to fall and since we planned to sail thru the night we headed back to shore and away from the current but for the ten hours we were out there we picked up lots of nice miles.     We sailed thru the night on a beautiful broad reach.   In the dark it seemed like the boat was flying!   The seven knots we were making felt like twenty.   Strange sensation.   Good sensation. Day Five: Gotta Make Miles!   Sailed very hard into the wind and waves in the morning…. Fo

We're Off....  Leg One Done!   But LOTS more to go.... After sailing thru some rain late in the day it was nice to be off Miami grilling steaks.

A:   The Local Wildlife comes by to admire your work. I’d just started to put the rub rails back on the yacht after three coats of Cetol Teak and two coats of Cetol Gloss when I heard bubbles coming from underneath the boat.   I was a little confused.   After six days of working on the boat… suddenly a new and different sound.    Then, I spotted my guest.   The biggest dang manatee I’d ever seen.   He surfaced, breathed a little, and then went back down underneath the boat.   This scenario actually happened twice more before it dawned on me I should trade my screwdriver for a camera. So here are two pics. He parked himself under the yacht and surfaced about six times each after about five minutes. Twice he hung around and blew water out like he was playing….. Maybe he was trying to help… Who knows? Spill the Wine – Teak Week 2015

Teak Week 2015 - Key Largo Florida    The first annual teak week has occurred!  Yea!  But as it turns out we’re going to need two weeks to perform a “teak week”…. We were able to remove the rub rail, sand, wash, tape, and apply three coats of teak gloss but we still need two more coats of high gloss.   You are not supposed to apply the gloss in direct sunlight so we waited until the sun hit the trees before we started.   This caused me to go buy several spot lights to illuminate the boat into the evening.                 The first time to do all this very likely slowed us down tremendously because of the learning curve, but one has to wait 24 hours between coats of gloss so you can only get so much done in a week.  Ideally, I’d like to perform a full maintenance cycle on the yacht and that will certainly fill the second week. However….   Spill The Wine is getting in good shape for her first big trip in a few weeks.