It was a beautiful day, a really great way to start the rally. We were a bit apprehensive about the predicted high winds coming in a day or two, but we enjoyed the moment. Noah and Pär put up the whisker pole so that we could have the jib out wing on wing and not have it luff all over the place. The whisker pole was installed at the last minute (seriously, they finished it on Saturday). It worked pretty well, though it was a little complicated to get all of the control lines run correctly. The preventer lines for the boom were very simple and also worked very well. The preventer was absolutely necessary with the cross waves and light winds. It would have been so unpleasant to have the boom bouncing constantly.
In the provisioning seminar they mentioned having an easy, comforting meal for the first night. I hadn’t fully thought through what it would be until a day or two before, but I ended up cooking the classic Spanish Chickpeas and Spinach with Tomato Ginger sauce, a perfect dinner to say goodbye to Spain and hello to the sea. Not to mention it was good to use the bag of spinach first thing, since we didn’t have much room in our fridge. It underlined the fact that our pots are sized for two-person dinners, not four-person dinners, since it filled our larger pot exactly to the brim, and it was probably just barely enough food for all of us. It will be interesting to figure out how I will adjust meals for that issue.
We divided our nighttime watches into 4 three hour shifts, from 7-10, 10-1, 1-4 and 4-7. That almost exactly covers the dark hours, though it is dark around 6:30pm. I volunteered T for the 4-7 watch, because he often is up from about 4am onwards. I took the 1-4am watch, mostly because it was already a luxury to me to only have 1 three hour watch at night, instead of at least two. Pär and Noah took the first and second watches, respectively. They ended up working them together a bit, especially the first night.