Thursday 30 Sept, re-launch 2021, day 1: A travel and reflection day.
We’re back! And this time we do mean the royal WE. Both of us are traveling today, from Bucharest to USA, to be reunited with our beloved Cloudy Bay. This blog is written en-route, care of Turkish Airlines.
For those wondering where-on-earth we’ve been since our last posting, back in June, we are happy to tell you we had a wonderful and very active summer in Europe, land-lubbering 🙂
And for those who are totally lost on where we are at with our sailing adventure, let me take you back to early 2020, when Cloudy Bay was last on the water. We were happily cruising the western Caribbean, meandering towards Panama for our next adventure: crossing to the Pacific Ocean. The Covid thingy was in the news, but it just sounded like all the others: SARs, Birdflu etc. Something the media was touting, but would surely just fizzle-out, right? The early ban on Chinese entering the US seemed more like a political move dressed up in a pandemic cloak. Really nothing for us to worry about.
But then while in Montego Bay, Jamaica, we started to hear of countries banning cruise liners and people were actually starting to die of this thing over in Europe! The rhetoric, and our concern, jumped up a notch.
Cayman was our next destination before Cuba, and we decided we should get there sooner rather than later. Shoddy Jamaica didn’t feel like the place to be if this so-called pandemic actually arrived at our doorstep (our cockpit hatchway).
We sailed into Grand Cayman just hours before they shut the border and then ended up locked down for 2 full months. But we were on a free mooring ball, over beautiful coral, in the bluest of water. It could have been worse, right? We did manage 2 days touring the island before it went into a full and very strict lockdown. Even swimming off the beautiful beaches was not allowed. In fact, we were the only people in Cayman allowed to swim – around our boat. Here, each day we observed more and more sea-life returning to the corals under Cloudy Bay. Presumably because of no cruise liners. On a normal day there would have been 4-5 of these monolithic beasts anchored here, emitting their pollution and tourists.
As the days rolled into May it was clear that starting the Pacific was now “off” for this season. And as it steadily got hotter and hotter each day, and with hurricane season looming, we decided to head back to the sanctuary of good ‘ol Herrington Harbour, in USA, enjoy the summer in Europe and sail off to the Pacific again in the autumn (of 2020).
The close call was that we very nearly headed to Panama to haul out there, rather than USA. Logistically it made sense, but something told us not a good idea. And thank goodness for our intuition, given the horror stories we have since heard of boats left in the tropics during Covid, gaining mold, rot, condensation and more.
After several days sailing, we arrived into USA and were rather shocked at what we saw. You would never know Covid was upon them as we watched thousands party on the memorial holiday weekend at Cape Lookout.
With Cloudy Bay safely out the water in her familiar yard, and under the good eye of Ray, we managed to get a repatriation flight back home to Bucharest, where we had a quiet lock-downish summer.
By autumn 2020 it was clear the Pacific was not going to be open for business any time soon, so it was back out to Cloudy Bay for me, to get the rig down and winterize the boat.
And here was our Covid blessing. With the rig down, we discovered an alarming crack in a back-stay swedge that would have surely failed pretty soon, resulting in the mast falling down, likely somewhere mid-Pacific! If not before. This made the decision to re-new all the rigging an easy one. And with that fright I also decided this would be a good time to give all key systems on the boat a deep service before we headed off again.
During that autumn ’20 visit and the spring ‘21 visit I did just that: rebuild of the drive train, hydraulic furling systems, all rigging components, rudder bearing, Volvo exhaust and plenty more.
But if you had been following our blogs, you would already be aware of all the above.
So what have we done since the last blog post in June? Well, it’s been a hectic and eventful summer. Romania and Europe were now fully open and, if you had the EU vaccine certificate, easy to move around. So we did just that. Completing 2 tours on our Suzuki Burgman scooter (or our “little moped”, as my son Alex cheekily calls it!). First a 2-week tour through Bulgaria and around Macedonia in northern Greece. Then later a 3-week trip all the way across to southern France, via Hungary, Slovenia, Italy and Corsica. Then returning via the Alps. The scooter doesn’t match the stowage of Cloudy Bay but was an equally unique way to travel. Mostly on minor roads and with wonderful vistas.
In-between these adventures I got into the yacht racing scene on the Romanian Black Sea. Crewing on a fully carbonized First 40.7 called Irony and meeting lots of new and very friendly like-minded sailors. Boy, I sure did miss the excitement of racing! And the Irony crew take it very seriously, usually finishing in the top 3 of the fleet of 40+ boats.
We also squeezed in a trip to the birth place of Cloudy Bay, where we attended the Hallberg Rassy open yard weekend in Ellos, Sweden, where we viewed the new designs, met the HR-Parts team and also other HR owners.
Then onto UK which finally allowed entry without quarantine by late summer. There, we managed to visit and meet up with 35 family and friends over 2 weeks in London, Essex, Cumbria and Scotland.
And finally, the hot news of the summer. We are now grandparents! Grandpa Glen and Buni Oana 🙂
My daughter had a beautiful baby girl in Perth, Australia on 3rd September. Sadly though we cannot be introduced any time soon, due to Australia’s strict Covid immigration rules.
And this leads us into our future sailing plans. We want to get started across the Pacific, but once that adventure starts there won’t be much stopping for 2 years. And we want to meet the baby before she goes to school! Plus, we don’t want to start the Pacific until it is fully open to cruisers. Currently it’s not.
So, our plan for the coming year is a relaxed winter season “south” then return to USA again next spring and have another summer in Europe, and hopefully a trip to Australia for our induction into grand parenthood.
Over the next month we will put Cloudy Bay’s rig back up, change the last of the original brass thru-hulls to bronze, paint, polish and launch. Hoping to set sail southbound by early November before we need our wooly hats!
