Out of Town Guests This Week

We hosted some fabulous people this weekend, friends from London. Of course, we thought we would treat them to a few days sailing the Puget Sound on our lovely cruising catamaran. There were a few problems with this plan:

1. Our cruising catamaran is a live aboard cruising sailing boat full of children. Dirty, loud, (often overly) friendly children. I'm not sure how relaxing it was to spend time with us.
2. The wind decided this weekend to be utterly windy. Magnificently windy sailing weather is fantastic for sailors, but again it lacks a certain restful relaxing vacationy quality for the uninitiated.
3. We encountered a rather vicious chop while bobbing on our mooring ball off Blake Island rendering it impossible to sleep unless you are one of those little microdogs that routinely nap in old lady purses and are accustomed to the movement.

Would YOU want to sleep with these on board?
Uploaded by toastfloats

On that last point, my good friend Behan has already delightfully poked at me with the "oh but you said that wasn't a problem for catamarans" line. My first impulse is to stick my tongue at her. Frankly, my second and third impulses were unprintable without adding an explicit tag to my blog. But the point is unfortunately quite valid. We cat owners do pratt on and on about how much more comfortable our boats can be, even on a choppy anchorage. And as a rule, this is the case. We pitch, yaw, swoop and dip considerably less than a monohull.

However, less is not a blanket statement of "not at all" which we discovered to our dismay on Saturday night. It was without question our most uncomfortable night on record. If the waves are frequent, strong, and steep enough, we all bounce around like ping pong balls in a bathtub full of toddlers. In the future, I'll stick all the dirty clothes in a large bucket of sudsy water in the cockpit and at least get my clothes agitated for my troubles.

The upside is that Dr C and I were able to pull of the mooring ball at 3am and move the boat to the leeward side of the island without sustaining any damage to our boat or to our relationship. The move was cooperative and went without a hitch. Amazing. Couldn't see a damn thing, but we caught that mooring ball first pass around and settled in for a second night's sleep.