Saturday, April 4, 2009

Ready, set, wait...

Yesterday was a gorgeous day: bright sun, warm temperatures and no wind. I started washing the outside of the boat fairly early, thinking that I’d be done and we could leave about noon. Well, maybe one o’clock. Before I knew it, it was clear that I wouldn’t be finished before they stopped opening our drawbridges for the day at 3:30 pm.

So Solstice is clean and flying new flags—U.S., courtesy Dutch, and SSCA commodore burgee—but we’re still here at the dock in Amsterdam. When I posted our new status on Facebook, cruising friends variously congratulated us for not leaving on Friday after all (a sailor’s superstition forbids Friday departures) and sympathized with our difficulty in leaving a place that we’ve enjoyed for so long. We savored the rest of the afternoon sitting outside on our clean boat and visiting with the neighbors. And we took advantage of the extra night to do the nighttime photo shoot that we had postponed when it was so cold out. John should be able to get a nice photo page for the Web site from that, and we had a lot of fun.

This morning the wind is back, albeit from the opposite direction and slightly less. The forecast calls for calm tomorrow, so I guess we’ll wait one more day. Where have you heard that before?

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