David's Diary: Saturday, October 20, 2001

Moving In Day

Today, after two weeks in Port St. Louis du Rhone, we moved on to our new sailboat. For the non-boaters reading this, commissioning a sailboat is a bit like moving into a semi-custom house. You order all of the features that you want, but once you are about to move in you find a number of new custom features that would make the home 50% more livable. It took an extra two weeks for Yacht Services in Port St. Louis to complete our extra customization requests, but the end result is a boat that will let us home school and live our life the way we want.

The last couple of days have given us a warning about what things can be like on the Mediterranean Sea. Around noon on Thursday, the heavens opened and rain poured until dinner time. At the same time, the wind rose to 25-30 knots (approximately 50-60 km/hour). The wind continued throughout Thursday, all of Friday, and continued as we started to move on the boat today. The wind was so strong that some of us even had a little motion sickness, even though the boat was tied to the dock. This was a good learning experience for us about just how strong the winds can be and how long the wind lasts here in the Med.

By the end of the day, things were bright and calm. The winds of the last few days were gone, but not forgotten. As we struggled to settle into the boat, moving aboard is like moving house, we did get to enjoy brilliant sunshine and 25C weather. In the next week or so we will venture out of the marina and do a short cruise towards Marseille. But we will only do so when the weather forecast looks good and we know that we can find a safe harbour or anchorage.