New Video: Sailing Te Ara Episode 6

Hey everyone!!

I hope you are having a wonderful new year, because you can bet that McKay and I are! We have ramped up the sailing experiences and are only a few months away from leaving the Bay Area for good and headed south to warmer waters.

But before I dive into that….. check out the new video McKay and I made of our adventures sailing last weekend and staying the night “on the hook” (anchored) of the coast of Sausalito. You can find it in the videos section of our blog site, or on our YouTube channel here: https://youtube.com/@sailingteara

So, I have been getting a lot of feedback lately from all of you that we need to do a new blog post…. and here it is! I apologize for the long delay, it has been a heck of a busy few months getting the boat ready and it was hard for me to take my mind of of all the ongoing tasks long enough to write this. Luckily, we just had the boat hauled out to have some work done on the remaining thru hulls/engine, so I have a few days of breathing room.

Recent Projects

Where to even begin….. McKay and I have been doing so much work on the boat lately, it is really starting to blur together. We are getting a dodger made (windshield), I got new batteries (500 lbs of them), I installed a new solar array to charge said batteries, we got an inverter, we got a spinnaker (big colorful sail), new mizzen sail, and new jib sail. We installed wind instruments, topmast lights, rigging, a radar system, and GPS. We replaced all the fresh water tubing in the entire boat and got the forward shower working.

In addition to all of this work, we have been trying to find times to sail in the crazy winter weather of the Bay Area. Honestly, it seems like it either blows 30-40 kts or not at all. It didn't help that Northern California had ~3 weeks of "Bomb Cyclones" and heavy rainfall. It made it extremely difficult to plan any projects or sailing trips. It was wild to stay on the boat for those weather events though.... at one point I saw 45 knots of wind in the harbor..... and we are sheltered on our side of the island! I'm sure a lot of you saw images or videos of all the destruction on the west coast from the storms... and the Bay was no exception. Quite a few boats and docks were destroyed in the multi week blow.

What's Next?

All that aside, I am really looking forward to this new year. We only have a hand full of projects left to finish up before Te Ara will be truly ready to cross an ocean. McKay and I plan on spending the next weekends in February sailing out the gate to Drakes Bay and Half Moon Bay (weather permitting). That will give us some long distance sailing practice together before headed out The Gate for the last time in late April or early May and pointing our bow south to Ventura. In a few weeks, we will mark the two year anniversary of purchasing Te Ara. Two years of hard work struggling to learn new systems, climbing masts, cleaning bilges, and rebuilding this old boat from the water up.

Yet all the effort is made worth it for a single sunrise like this one:

Cheers

Gavin and McKay