Getting the boat in the water was a bit of a to-do this summer.
I was scheduled to go in the week of June 1, but I had finished my prep the last week in May and asked to go in a week early. I called the yard on Friday May 29 and asked if I was in the water. They told me yes, you're in, so I went down on Saturday to see how things were, charge the batteries, start the engine, etc. But when I got there, I found out that I hadn't been launched. The yard apologized, explaining that Chris had told them to launch me and the crew told him that they had. They promised to launch me first thing on Monday.

I went down on Tuesday to do Amtrak work on the boat. They had launched Hukilau, but they hadn't commissioned the engine or hooked up the batteries as they were supposed to. About a half hour after I called the office to find out what was going on, Bill came by to do the work. He installed a new zinc in the heat exchanger (pencil zinc) and did a load test on the batteries. Battery 1 was weak; battery 2 was ok. He recommended charging the batteries for a few days, then seeing how they did.

I left the batteries charging (the new charger is boss) while we went to RI from Saturday to Wednesday. When we got back, I went to the boat to see if the engine could be started on one battery. The charger showed both batteries as fully charged. On battery 1, the cranking was slow, but it did start. Things were easier on battery 2. I'll call that a success.

Last Saturday, Lily, Patti and I went to the boat to put the sails on and go for the first sail of the year. The weather predicted light winds (< 10mph), but of course, it was blowing. Like 15 knots. All day.

As we started to put the genny on, Ernie came walking down the dock. We never met Ernie before, but he offered to help. So he stood on the dock and fed the sail into the slot while I hauled it up from the winch. We had raised the sail about 90% of the way up, when Ernie realized it was upside down. Ooops. It didn't take long to fix the problem, and we chatted with Ernie a bit. I hope I recognize him later without his mask.

The three of us then went to bend the main on. I was psyched this year to sail with all four battens in the sail, as the top two were hiding below for all of last season. I found them over the winter and was looking forward to seeing how the sail performed with all of them in. But no. Patti lost her grip on the largest batten and it went overboard. Oh well.....

We had a little trouble with the main as well, putting it on twisted at first, requiring us to rehike it up the mast again. But we perservered, and soon we were done. All told, it took us about two hours to bend both sails on.

It was still blowing hard, pushing us off the dock. Patti was tired from the sail bending and was clearly nervous about going out in these conditions, so we decided to relax on the dock. At least Lily and Patti relaxed. I puttered about, readjusting the Lazy Jacks and mounting the new dock line mount, replacing the unit that had broken last summer.

We are really ready to go sailing. The target is now Father's Day. Let's make it happen people.