Cruising is no different than the rest of life - sometimes the best laid plans have to be changed. Cruisers accept this by saying their plans are cast in sand. Well, our plans in the sand had a wave wash over it and changed it all. When we left Lagos, Portugal, the original plan was to head south-south-west to the Canary Islands en-route to the Caribbean. Instead we turned Nokomis almost due east to head for Gibraltar.
Now the bay at Gibraltar is extremely busy and we did not want to arrive in darkness. We timed our departure perfectly to arrive two mornings later. Well, this turned out to be our best passage, ever. The winds and waves could not have been better. So good in fact, that we arrived about 8 hours earlier than planned - that is right, just after the sun had set. We white-knuckled for a couple of hours until we reached our slip.
We are shipping Nokomis back to the United States and had a lot of work to do preparing her for loading. We took everything from outside of Nokomis and secured it below... that is everything save the mast and the dinghy. Even the boom was taken off the mast and secured below. Needless to say, there is very little room left below on Nokomis.