Sailing Away From The Heat!

Keepin' cool on the water!

We wake up each day making excuses for not tackling our boat projects ... our solar panels need to be installed, our Mantus anchor needs to be mounted, and various other items need to be scratched off our list. Each day the heat sucks away our motivation. Damn, it's hot! 

We got a few things done in August, telling ourselves that we'd knock out the larger projects in September .. ya know, when the weather was cooler. Well, Mother Nature played a joke on us with the hottest September EVER recorded! It's now October, and we're still breaking heat records .. the "feel like" temperature yesterday was 100 degrees. We're not just sitting around, but the weeks are flying by and we're not as productive as we should be. 

It had been a couple of weeks since we sailed, so we figured we'd escape the heat by sailing Nirvana this past Sunday. We need all the practice we can get, and we want to keep barnacles off of our prop too! It'll be so nice when we're in water that's blue and clear .. and that we can scrub Nirvana in.

Lake Pontchartrain is shallow, so it was pretty choppy with winds at least 15 knots. Another project on our list ... add reefing lines. We only let our "deck sweeper" genoa out halfway, as any more caused us to heel more than was efficient .. or comfortable. I don't like our rail in the water! We do have a smaller head sail, which we'll try out soon. Nirvana has so little room aboard that we're not sure where to store our extra head sail. Right now it's in our storage shed. Wondering .. which sail do you think we'll use the most when sailing to the Bahamas from Louisiana .. a 150 genoa or the smaller jib (not sure of size ... maybe 100 or 90)?

You can see in this photo of Ken that we were heeling, but not too much. This is enough for me!

We had a good day on the water, and we didn't sweat. Sailing is a great way to escape the heat! We keep hearing that living at anchor is much more comfortable than living at a marina .. we hope so! It's hot in our slip, and as soon as Nirvana was docked .. we started sweating. We do have a portable a/c unit for now, but it struggles to keep us cool inside, and it doesn't help when we're out on the deck or in our cockpit. We've added this 10x13 waterproof sun shade, which does seem to help keep our interior cooler. It's polyester, is well made .. and I didn't have to sew it! It also provides coverage between our companionway and bimini, so when our companionway hatch is open we don't have to worry if there's a little rain. We'll be finding a place to store this sun shade on our boat when we leave the dock!

When we're not sailing, we look forward to escaping the heat by watching our Saints play football. We either watch the game on our salon's tv, or go to a local bar .. with air conditioning. We're so glad football season is here ...Who Dat!

The local weather forecast says we'll have our first cool front this coming Tuesday .. temps in the 80's! The forecast has us motivated to get working on our list next week. We've gotta get moving further South soon!

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!