The next couple of blogs is going to be like looking back in a time machine... yes I'm that far behind...

Easter weekend – 2013 (sieve is very active and draining stuff like dates and details just like raindrops off a leaf. I'll do my best and if I don't get it right, you'll never know because you weren't there :) )

So, having said that, Easter weekend was our first real sail on Venture (where we didn't actually have to be somewhere at a certain time). On the Thursday, Dave and his daughter Jessie met at the Garden Island Yacht Club, enthused and raring to take the boat out and manoeuvre her through the obstacle course that is the Garden Island river channel and out into ocean waters on her way to the Crown Marina at North Haven ... our mooring for the next few days.

So, Dave said the ETA should be about a couple of hours. The wind rose after they left and the weather turned not-too-nice. The tide was against them and I wondered how they'd go. As it is, they would go slow.

I was to meet them at the marina with the car so I got to North Haven and waited, ate dinner, waited some more, drove around trying to find the marina entrance, read my book, waited some more and about 4 hours later, and in the dark, he finally rang to say they were almost there. By this time, and after a lot of driving around and looking at Google maps, I had finally come across the marina gates (to which I had the entry codes) and went to meet him. Okay, well I found the car park but had no idea where to go from there. Panic was mounting as another call from Dave told me that he was almost there so I did the only thing I could think of... grabbed a couple of passers-by who, as luck would have it, were going to the actual mooring so led the way and then helped Dave find his way into the poorly lit marina.