First thing Saturday Captain Al pulled the power cord from the dock, and Joe and Tom cast off the lines setting Dragonfly loose once again for a winter adventure. For those not lucky enough to get all the past years’ proofs, of yet to be published Dragonfly’s Adventures, we’ll try and give a few highlights from our “impressment” this winter.

There are actually 3 couples on the first leg of this passage south and we are lucky enough to be the least experienced crew on board. Jill and Al have been sailing Dragonfly since she was built & launched 14 years ago and have been chartering and cruising her since then. Helen and Joe have DejaVu a 43′ catamaran that he built & launched almost the same time as Dragonfly. This year DejaVu has been moored in Georgetown, Bahamas for the summer and they are coming along for the ride back to their boat. A real advantage for them and for us: they get to haul down to their boat a van-full of supplies, and we get their company, expertise and help with the watches. And once they get DejaVu re-rigged they’ll buddy boat with us for some of the passages south. Earlier in this blog I recorded a trip north from Guatemala to Florida with Joe on DejaVu. Another cat builder/owner Don Pole accompanied us on that passage as well.

It’s really great when we can all get back together for quality time on the water. Thankfully Dragonfly and DejaVu are still in the fleet. Paradox and Don’s cat Polecat have gone their own ways.

Chores for the first 36 hours on board were repairing the faulty macerator pump – installed by Tom (two out of three worked, in self defense), reattaching a jiffy-line that supports the boom, re-installing a nut on the traveller block, repairing a smoked 12v supply wire, working on the AIS source to the Cap’n, bolting down the new flat screen TV, and installing a new mount on the Sirius radio. We also managed to hook 3 Tuney fish in the morning and Jill seared us some Sesame Ahi with two kind of salad for a sumptuous lunch.

There was time for snoozing, reading, testing the spin bike addition to Dragonfly and a little blogging. Regarding the latter it’s interesting to learn that the blogging software on the iPad doesn’t appear to save when it can’t Publish (without the Internet), so I’ll be drafting future blogs in a word processor app to copy and paste when we re-enter cyber space.