We sailed over the holidays with Heather and Jennifer. It was blowing up to 30 knots so we got to try out our third reef on the main sail. With the third reef in and about ¼ of the jib unfurled the boat handled the weather no problem. We weren’t really happy with the third reef as it is really hard to tie down the cringles and then the sail doesn’t seem to be very flat, there is a lot of bag in the sail, not sure what to do about it.

It is Jan. 5, today and we went out to see if we figure out how the wind vane worked. We put up just the jib and we had 10 – 15 knots of wind. We had the vane working when we were close hauled and then on a beam reach, so I am quite happy with that. We still need lots of practice sailing with it to be able to figure it out.

There have been a number of gales and storms here in the past week, it was forecasted to blow up to 50 knots the other day so we decided to stay put on our slip. There have been some really high tides and with the big winds a lot of the drift wood that is ashore has been floated off the beaches, so there are lots of logs and debris in the water. I wouldn’t want to be a power boater this week.

We went to a sailmakers yesterday and bought supplies to complete our sail repair kit, all we need now is a palm. We paid a visit to the sailor’s exchange store to get some gear so we can rig up a preventer but the stuff we bought was too small. We are going to a seminar on Saturday about the psychology of cruising and provisioning, so that should be quite interesting.

We have set a date for our departure, Thursday, August 10, 2006. We plan to sail around Vancouver Island in late May as our tune up sail; we are planning to take about a month to do that. Then we will fine tune the boat and get ready to leave.