You may have been able to hear it from wherever you are - a groan of disappointment coupled with a sigh of relief. A groan that we had to terminate our cruising plans, but the sigh of relief that both Nelleke and ourselves were safe, us warm and comfy at home and Nelleke safe on the hard. The photo accompanying this post is of yours truly getting some more of the provisions off the boat from a position 12' in the air. It's a lot easier at a dock I assure you.

The last of the boats waiting for the weather set off very early this morning. By very early, I do mean early. We were at the boat at 06h15 to get her moving and on the way to the haulout and they were gone and had cleared the harbour by then. I had a look at the weather models and it appears that they will have a good day today but then it will start to get ugly late tomorrow. With a 30' boat I doubt if they can comfortably average any more than 4 knots so, since that trip is 250 nm as the crow flies it will take them 60 hours to make the trip. I have my fingers crossed for them.

Now.

When I was in the military after every exercise or operation all of the senior participants would get together for what was called an after action report the intent of which was to discuss lessons learned, so hopefully, you wouldn't make the same mistakes again. This will be my after action report. I hope that by writing things down I will be thinking things through and getting them to penetrate my thick skull.

Firstly, once Barb and I had been scheduled for our surgeries at the start of the summer, that should have been enough to delay our cruising plans for the year. Then, once the three to four month recoveries were over and we got to work on the projects, I should have done a much more sensible time appreciation of the work required even of those jobs that I knew I had to get done. If I had I would have realized that I was closing the window for departure even tighter. My problem was my ridiculous level of self assuredness and optimism. For example, I just knew that putting the self steering on would only take a couple of days (reality being more like ten just because I was doing the initial stages of it prior to surgery and was a lot slower and certainly much more tender); designing, getting built, and installing the solar arch, plus reinstalling the panels on top was only going to take a couple of weeks, most of which was going to be waiting for the machine shop to build my design (reality being more like four weeks the difference, again being my personal level of decrepitude). All of these were jobs that I had planned for and didn't include the other jobs such as rewiring the heavy DC power lines, replumbing the pressure water system, installing new battery chargers, nor the extra time taken for the additional jobs that cropped up as we went along - the new cranking bank to name just one.

What this led to was my conscious decision to NOT do some things that were on our "to do before the next trip list" plus things that I would normally have insisted on doing such as a couple of shakedown cruises to confirm that all systems were go, so to speak. This is the very first time that we tried to begin a cruise without having done several short cruises locally first. My excuse, and it's a poor one, is that I knew that it was getting late in the year and we needed to get going. Definitely not a sensible attitude for this lifestyle. In a way it's a good thing that we were forced to turn back as there are more and more things that are cropping up to add to the list.

My upcoming posts will deal with each of those projects with before and after photos and tons of mea culpas I'm sure.