Aleria's Adventures

Travel by sailboat is one of the most environmentally sound ways to see the world, especially with all the new ways to avoid using fossil fuels. You can make your own fresh water, you can harness the power of the wind, the sun, and the seas, and you use the wind to propel your vessel to new places. New anchors help us limit the damage we do to the seabed. We still have issues with waste disposal, but we are dealing with them better than we once did.   Yet, often we leave our boats behind to return home or travel to distant places to see family scattered around the earth. That travel comes with a cost. We learned during the pandemic that we don't really need to travel so much and yet the airlines now have more passengers than pre-Covid times. Everything takes longer. Longer to pass through security due to Covid restrictions and post-9/11 issues, longer to queue for everything as there are fewer people willing to take menial jobs, and longer to get from one place to another due ...

This past weekend, we finally had a chance to launch Aleria . The weather was calm and sunny on Saturday but we lost several hours when the keel kept getting caught on the straps and we couldn't leave the launch well. Finally, Alex and I lifted the straps and untied the ropes the yard had used to tie the two straps together. It was hard work but we were finally free.  Our first task was to liberate halyards that were stuck at the sheaves at the tops of each mast. We each had to climb a mast. He got the main this time and used the Topclimber. I got the mizzen and was winched up in the bosun's chair. Missions successful.  We shlepped lots of boxes of stuff from the car to the boat and laid out lots of ropes in preparation for raising the sails. The wind, contrary to forecast, was stronger than expected and out of the east. We were facing west at the dock. We tried to turn the boat around so we could hoist the sails into the wind, but the engine kept shutting down. The fuel filte...