Sailing sucks

We spent a quiet night in the North Cove Harbor Refuge in Old Saybrook - they even have guest moorings that they welcome transients to use for up to 3 days at a time. Thanks Old Saybrook! If you're ever in Newport you can come sleep on our couch for 3 days too.

I guess the best way to approach this log entry is to show the beginning of the day.... as we headed back out to the Long Island Sound...

Nice eh? Puffy clouds.... awwww, so pretty!

And then the end of the day as we motored through the breakwater at Stamford.... full moon, bright evening sun. Pretty, isn't it?

What's missing in these photos is the ass kicking we got all day long from one end of the Sound to the other. Those 40 knot gusts I mentioned yesterday that we avoided by staying in the lovely cove? They were out there waiting for us today. The wind had shifted a teensy bit to the north, so it wasn't really right on the nose now right? Didn't matter... Mother Nature smacked us around for 10 hours in a 'take that you mere mortals!' kind of way. Soaked us, soaked the boat, tossed all our carefully stowed belongings onto the cabin floor and generally made us sorry for ever thinking bad thoughts about her. Then about an hour before we made Stamford a 50 knot gust blew out our mail sail. It's toast. Shredded. In tatters. Ribbons. Whatever you call it - it's sailing days are over. Ours aren't.... but we need to regroup a bit and make up a new pretend budget to include a new mainsail.

After the fiasco with the mainsail I almost forgot to mention the brandy, brand new shiny autopilot we installed before we left Newport on Wednesday.... it stopped working about an hour into today's thrashing. So now we have two autopilots - one in the boat that doesn't do any of the automatic things it's supposed to do, and one that's in a box 200 miles from here. Yep... this whole sailing thing is going just as we planned.