About a month ago, we turned Cinderella around in the slip, bow facing north as we always do in winter. We like being in a better position to take the strong cold north winds, and let what sunshine we have available during the season light and warm our cockpit. We've done the maneuver many times before, maybe that made us a bit complacent, or maybe we needed a reminder that every trip is at least slightly different. In any case, things didn't go exactly as planned ... we had just a bit of docking drama ...
We turned at high slack tide around 7 pm (just after dusk). Bit of miscalculation and miscommunication had us in the fairway under the minimal control of a single dockline until some friends from further up the dock came by to save the day. Wow!
Later, in the cockpit with a glass of rum, we did an after action analysis as we always do after even the simplest of trips, and certainly after things went wrong, to see what we could learn. And really, this was all about knowing that things take time, and taking our time. We had gotten home late from an appointment in Jacksonville, and had it kind of locked in our heads all day that we were going to move the boat tonight at slack tide. But because we had gotten home so late, we hadn't had time to fully discuss what each of us expected of the other. Worse, we hadn't made sure that we had all the docklines where we expected them to be! And that was the problem; I had expected there to be two docklines; one we had just placed on the piling, and one we had left opposing it on the finger pier. Which latter one Dan had unfortunately released when we left the slip. So there was nothing for me to pull on, until we handed the errant line to the friends on the dock.
We weren't as ready as we should have been, hadn't taken the time to double check that everything was where we expected it to be due to the perceived time pressure (that really wasn't there. We could have moved just a little after the exact moment of slack tide and still been okay. We could have moved the next slack tide next morning if it got to late.) We let artificial urgency make us move before we were ready. Rookie mistake!
A month later, though, and I'm typing this while the wind howls and the boat barely moves, because the wind is coming right on the bow just like it was designed to do. The whole purpose of turning around. The additional good news is that we used the "backwards" position of the boat to finish the painting project (more on that in an upcoming post). The bad news, though, is that with our stern and cockpit to the (very public) dock, we're again living in the fishbowl. We frequently overhear comments like "Look! That boat's name is Cinderella!" or "Wow, they came all the way from Michigan!" Or people will try to peer down below. Reminds us of our days on El Galeon, Dan pointed out. The galley where we took our lunch breaks was roped off but open to the main deck that the visitors were exploring, and they'd all be curious about this part of the ship that they could see into but not go into. They're not going to learn anything from it, this part of the ship is modern, but it's hard to relax while a hundred strangers are staring at you while you try to feed your face!
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