We got some shocking news when our delivery captain moved up our delivery time table. We thought we still had another week, but when the captain said it was time to go, we hopped in a rental car and drove down to Ft Lauderdale!

We arrived at the boat around 1am. We weren’t supposed to stay onboard overnight but since we arrived after midnight with plans to take off around 6am we figured no one would even notice. We brought just enough out to the boat that we could make our bed and then crashed. When we went down for our sea trial, I got a little queasy on the boat sitting at the dock, so I made sure to take some Bonine before we arrived this time. Zero queasiness, mission accomplished.

My alarm went off a few hours later. Time to meet Jeff, our captain (he also represented the sellers as a broker for our deal), and go provision. Jeff arrived on time, as we were unpacking the rental car. We moved everything to the boat, then I stayed behind to put stuff away while the guys went grocery shopping. We left the dock around 7:30, then we stopped to fill the water and diesel tanks. Luckily both were nearly full, so our first fuel bill was pretty cheap. We made it through the 8am bridge opening and out to sea.

As predicted, the waves were pretty high. It was rough enough that it was difficult to move around, but it wasn’t alarming. If anything, it made us both realize how well the boat handles rougher seas – like she was made for it. Jeff kept encouraging us to nap, since we’d all be standing night watches, but there was so much noise and movement that I couldn’t sleep. We were in view of the coast the entire day. I kept marveling over the fact that we were doing 7+ knots completely under sail power, and we were supposed to get a Gulf Stream boost later on as well.

We need to go straight north to get to Charleston. We are trying to hold a course east of that line, because winds are forecast to  be from the north later on, so the further east we get, the more sailing we can do. It is really hard to hold a course eastward because that is where the wind is coming from, so we are mostly sailing north – I think we are averaging 15° heading.

We had our first boat thing break. Kyle was laying in the cockpit trying to nap when he noticed that the tubing holding our wind generator on is cracking. So that is now secured with several lines, we’ll have to get it re-welded sometime soon because it looks pretty bad.

At one point, I was at the helm watching the waves get seemingly bigger and bigger, and just as Jeff came out we went over a huge nasty one. Jeff said “Wow, that must have been all of 8 feet!” and I gave him the side-eye, because come on, Jeff, that thing was definitely a 20 foot monster. Kyle and Jeff got bored and decided to see what kind of fishing equipment we had available. There are two rods mounted underneath the bimini, but it took them a while to find lures. Finally they came up with a box and Jeff threw a line in. I didn’t even hear it start to spool out, but sometime later Jeff was suddenly reeling in a fish and Kyle was digging around for a bucket. We got a tuna!

Again, it was still pretty rough and hard to move around, but apparently tuna bleed a lot so Jeff wanted to keep it out of the cockpit. He sat on the port transom cleaning the fish and Kyle stayed near him to grab him in case we bounced a little too much. However, no one fell in and we got a few tuna fillets! We were unprepared for fishing, all we had brought was a tiny cutting board and a paring knife so they weren’t the prettiest of fillets. Jeff said we shouldn’t cook it in the cabin because it would make it smell, and our grill is charcoal and we had not brought any charcoal. No tuna tacos yet. Jeff made pasta with marinara sauce instead.

Day 1 was a big, bouncing success. We watched the sunset and started up our watch schedule.