I have seen in many blogs cool and helpful themes for their posts…like Top Ten Tuesdays…What I like Wednesdays…I don’t know if this will be a weekly tradition of mine, but today was definitely a Friday of Firsts.
To start off, we left the Bay of Somme early in the morning in order to go with the tide. Not a first…but it was our first sunrise while sailing La Nomade!
I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful and peaceful way to start our day!
Another first, you ask? Well, it was my first time where I didn’t navigate the tiller the entire time. Unless there are tricky manouevers in which case Yves usually takes over, I usually command the tiller . Today, I handed that honor to our dear friend Pierre. Pierre? Who’s Pierre?! Another sailor aboard!? Nope…he is our trusty automatic pilot! Why is he called Pierre? We have a very complicated and capricious GPS who calls himself Pierre…but our Pierre aboard La Nomade will actually take you where you want to go instead of giving confusing and very frustraing directions. So, by handing over the command to Pierre, I was able to lie down inside our cabin for the very first time. Many sailing sources discourage people to stay inside a boat if they are prone to seasickness. I am one of the unfortunate sensitive, but this time, I was able to lie down in our cabin in order to warm myself up and get some rest without throwing up! A definite first! 😉
As we made our way west, we weren’t really sure where our next stop would be. At first, we thought St Valéry en Caux…and then Fecamp. The wind was blowing, the sun was shining..Yves was a happy sailor. Oh another first?? He managed to arrange all of the sails with the genoa and the tangon all by himself (as I mentioned above, I was inside the cabin). Not to mention that the tangon broke off and he had to repair that too first…nothing but a day of firsts!
But the real biggie? The real reason why I write this post?? We decided to go to Ouistreham which would mean our first real night sail as well as our 24 hr sail. I am quite sure it won’t be our last…but for me, this was quite monumental! I didn’t think we would actually sail for this long today. Yves was optimistic with the winds that were blowing and the weather report seemed to be quite benign for the night. Well, about 45 minutes before our arrival to Ouistreham, I can say that the weather report was all wrong! Even though we had already gone through a thunderstorm before, I never actually headed towards one. *Please note that we were not trying to prove ourselves to the weather gods. The port we were heading to just happened to have the most impressive lightnening show right above. Yay?!@#@*
Nevertheless, we safely arrived at the port of Ouistreham where we had our second to the last ‘first’. We handled a ecluse together. Alone. In the night. A ecluse is where you go through a canal, tie your boat to the edge so it won’t float all about, wait for the ecluse to fill up with water, and you head out, in our case, the marina. Pretty proud of ourselves since we never did that before together and alone.
And for the final first of this Friday…we arrived at the port of Ouistreham and much to our surprise, the entire marina is filled with boats that came from Britain to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-day. Who would have thought!?!
Good-bye Friday, Good morning Saturday!…I’m off to bed.