Santa Cruz, Tenerife, The Canary Islands. New Balance Polska We are sitting in the middle of a black gale, staunchly tied to the dock in a whirling basin of water and wind and rain with the pilings and lines and pontoons wailing like tigers and elephants. The town is partly shut down, due to the massive torrents of water flooding the island. Unbelievably, it is almost time to go. We have waited and waited for good weather, defined as having normal trade winds in the normal places for crossing the Atlantic in the winter.
Sometimes this happens in December, but more predictably it happens in January. For the last month, they have been absent, with the Azore high on vacation somewhere in America. Boats that left earlier have spent days motoring or flapping their sails or being happy to be going two knots forward. Waiting for something which one unequivocally has absolutely no control over is tedious, irritating, and disquieting to us modern civilized types. Even in beautiful places. 
It is the ultimate anti-adrenaline setup; even if I had done yoga daily I am not sure it would have changed the nagging hum of “We want to go, we want to go…”. new balance 998 black teal Looking at weather models on line does not change the weather, for if it did we would be in the Caribbean shortly, meeting up with Odd Arne’s family as planned. No matter that we continued to have tons of new boat projects, self-inflicted damages to repair, good company in fellow sailors, and a decent place to stay. After being extraordinarily helpful and clever with work aboard for almost three weeks, Odd Arne returned to Sweden. So Steve and I will cross together. This is the first time we have done a longer passage with just the two of us. Canotte San Antonio Spurs It brings up the dirty little secrets of the male/female division of labor on cruising sailboats. The range of what women do is analogous to ashore, from food shopping (which is given the more salty and robust name of “provisioning”) and cooking to working the foredeck knee deep in water and bending on the trisail in 50 knots. But what is different is that the need, in a pinch, for physical strength and agility is greater than ashore. Adidas Zx 700 pas cher homme Many women who identify as athletes draw a line on a sailboat mid ocean, usually somewhere forward of the mast. In medicine, when trying to get at some truth about someone, there is always an attempt to get down to the most succinct question. I think the key screening question here is “Do you put up and take down the spinnaker pole by yourself?” (It does not count if it is carbon fiber). Drew Brees – Purdue Boilermakers As a 63 year old who grew up before Title 9 was a reality, when girls did not do sports all the way through school, well, gosh, um, I don’t. Sometimes I have a hard time getting the refrigerator door open, which has gotten all akilter in spite of constant adjusting. All our halyards and reefing are at the mast. So I worry a bit, mostly about worst case scenario stuff, but the experienced racing crew aboard Temptress assured us that if we had gotten ourselves this far, from France to the Canaries, we had done the hard part. So we go. Our overnight sail from Lanzarote to here was good, one more building block of developing confidence in our boat. The winds rose slowly from 5 to 10 to 15 to 20 to 25 to 30 to 35 to 40, and we just kept changing sail. new balance 373 avis A cold front, which we had hoped to miss, passed through before our arrival and gave us four hours of wind on the nose clawing into shore. The RC did well, very well, sturdy and stable and able. Even pretty dry, if you can call a boat with water pouring over the doghouse dry. So we go. Christmas and New Year’s Eve aboard. Of course, the weather looks good for Friday, which is also a 13th. Three common adages are 1. Don’t have bananas on your boat. True if you want to catch fish.
2. Don’t take women aboard. Met a seemingly reputable Harvard grad/fisherman in Alaska once who followed that one. No comment. 3. Never leave port on a Friday. new balance roma viale dell’aeronautica The tie-breaker on superstition lore. Why risk it? I say the swell will be less after the low pressure if we wait until Saturday.