Saturday 24 October - Normandie's Birthday

Saturday 24 October - Normandie's Birthday
Normandie is celebrating her birthday at Cape Hatteras windsurfing. I am so very proud of her. Happy Birthday Normandie.
I arrived in the Canaries with no plan as to where to go and what to do. There are seven islands, roughly northeast / southwest, and the prevailing wind, almost trade wind, is from the northeast. There was no particular reason to chose Tenerife as landfall. All I knew was that there was an airport there. And since I checked in at Santa Cruz on Tenerife, I want to go back there to check out, in a month when we leave for Cape Verde. Now I want to visit the upwind islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Now is the time to make the move. The wind forecast is for light and variable for four days.
Starting at the south tip of Tenerife the firsr step is to go about 40 miles back up to Santa Cruz. But I need to back up a few days. I had it scheduled to have the boat hauled out of the water to paint the bottom, a hot, hard and dirty process. It was scheduled for the 19th and it happened the afternoon of the 20th, and I frantically went to work. The wind had died and the forecast was for no wind and I wanted to get the boat back in the water and heading north-east. In record time about 10:00 the 23rd, splash, Advent II was back in the water. I said goodbye to my friends and was underway at noon. Everything was piled up everywhere, all the painting supplies, dirty clothes (old scrubbed off bottom paint laying under the boat dirty) tools, have to remove and re-jury rig backstays so the travelift can pick up and to do that have to remove solar panels, plus eight bags of provisions for a month, all piled in the boat. That's OK, there is no wind and I can do some straightening up underway. Thee is an anchorage just north of Santa Cruz, and it will be a good staging place to cross the 60nm to Gran Canaria. True, there was no wind, but the ocean was just about a rough as it could be. I don't know why. There was a large, close swell mixed with a viscous surface chop coming from the south-east. Dog-gone I was getting knocked around. I had the solar panels on the floor with settee cushions on top in case something heavy jumped out of a locker and landed on one of them. One thing about it, when everything in on the floor nothing goes crash. Then the wind cam up, from the south-east. Good strong 15-18 knot wind. That caused another problem. The place I was going to anchor is exposed to the south-east. Change of plan. I rolled, bucked, tossed and jerked into the Santa Cruz Marina. That was a good call. I even saw three boats that had been friends along the way, and we had a German/Austrian/French get together.
There may be some convolutions of messages. Advent II doesn't go but six miles per hour, but it is faster than the internet. Normandie gave me a GoPro camera and I wanted to upload some video clips. A one minute clip took 280 minutes to upload. That is darn near five hours. When I get back to the internet I want to upload some pictures, etc.
Happy Birthday Normandie.
Love,
Bill