Rocinante's Voyages

Under way at last…

Carlos and Maria — Wed, 28 May 2003 19:45:10 +0000

ow this was more like it… 8:30 am, clear skies and a nice breeze!

It was a rough morning… not particularly found of failure, yours truly was in a foul mood and started thinking that it might be better to pay someone that actually knew what they were doing to take her home for us. Fortunately, my better half had more confidence in my abilities than I did and convinced me to give it another try… sure glad she did!

Getting her ready…

Carlos and Maria — Tue, 27 May 2003 00:00:30 +0000

Maria standing in the companionway of our first boat!

e were now the proud owners of a 1981 Catalina 30 Tall Rig Sloop currently named “Euphoria”. I had a meticulously detailed plan with an hour-by-hour schedule to get her across the Sound, down the East River, up the Hudson river and into her slip in Haverstraw NY and it was time to get down to business – boy, was I in for a rude awakening! Were to start? Oh, that’s right, the engine wouldn’t start… Lesson number 1, it’s a boat! Over the years, we’ve learned to take nothing for granted on a boat - Things that should move, don’t and things that shouldn’t move, do!

No worries! We got hold of the broker, hooked up a battery charger and continued on with the business of getting her ready to go. She was in pretty good shape, but there was a lot of “junk” down below (at least by our landlubber standards), so we spent the next bunch of hours cleaning up, organizing, checking thru-hulls, engine oil, coolent levels, etc. – all those books I read and all the info I got from folks on-line was sure coming in handy… if not for them I wouldn’t have a clew! Sorry, couldn’t help myself

Anyway, one interesting “find” during the process was our genoa nicely folded in the V-Berth! What the heck is it doing there? Time to figure out how to set up our roller-furler; good thing the previous owner had all his manuals in a big three-ring binder! Fast-forward through a lot of head scratching, page flipping and bruised knuckles, at 2:00 PM we were ready to go. I’m still not sure what we were thinking, but we left, only to return 4 hours later after sanity set in and we realized there was no way we were going to make City Island before nightfall.

It all started innocently enough…

Carlos and Maria — Sat, 15 Mar 2003 00:00:16 +0000

Me and the Misses...

s you may or may not know, a number of years ago, I got the crazy idea to build a boat. Noooo, not something reasonable like a skiff or a pram… Nope, I was going to build myself a 40 ft. sailboat! As usual, I dove in with both feet; I ordered books, started researching plans, joined on-line sailing forums, etc., etc., etc. I finally settled on a design that I felt met my objectives and started to put together a list of materials… long story short, instead of building, Maria and I purchased our first sailboat, an older Catalina 30 TR (Tall Rig) back in 03’ – hey, after all was said and done, I ended up with a boat, OK?

Those of you that know me personally, know that while my head is often in the clouds, my feet are always firmly planted on the ground… so, you know I had a plan! We would spend the first year cruising up and down the Hudson with the occasional trip out into the Long Island sound, the second year, we would head north to Maine and in our final year of “training”, we would head south to the Florida keys. The posts that follow are designed to inform and entertain you as we execute on said plan.

As I’m fond of saying, “life is what happens while you’re making other plans!” But we stuck with it, have had a great time, have met a ton of great people and have learned many lessons along the way; about sailing, about people and about ourselves. The most important of all was this:

“…you may not be able to control the wind, but you can adjust your sails”

Equally applicable to all aspects of our lives whether on land or sea!

Carlos & Maria
S/V Rocinante