We have sails! Oh, not quite ...

But we do have a birthday boy today; Happy Birthday Spencer! We have a long skinny stick poking the air above and about half the rigging in place. We scrambled to get enough spars and lines in place to hoist the sails for a trial fit this morning. Alex from the Quantum Sails loft in Newport drove down with no less than five sails for us. We were a bit nervous on both sides since these were built remotely based on measurements I took when we stepped the mast in Boulder a year ago. Turns out everything fit just perfect, buuuuut we have a few changes to make, so down they came and back to the loft. We had a miscomm on the UV cover for the jib, one of the track cars on the mainsail was missing parts, and we needed a bit different arrangement for the reef points. Fingers crossed for a quick fix so that we might actually go sailing.

We moved Alizée from the boat yard to her slip. Unfortunately, we had to dock twice since our assigned slip was occupied by someone who just tied up to eat lunch. (We're right below the Red36 restaurant: really good eats BTW.) Good news is that Alizée handled great in the stiff crosswind: so nice having a tiller, rather than a wheel, for tight maneuvering. Bad news is in the middle of all the jockeying around the bilge pumps (we have two on auto for redundancy) went off, which is never a good sign. Yup - much water in the bilge. My best guess was that the engine was so severely out of line that the wobble was making it impossible for the shaft seal to keep that big ole ocean out. After mulling this possibility over during lunch, we ran the engine pretty hard at the dock. Forward, not a drop. In reverse, water spurted not from the seal, but the seal vent tube. It looks like the prop wash in reverse is pressurizing the shaft tube and forcing water up the vent. Hmmmm. If that is all it is, I'll count us lucky.

The promised nasty weather starting moving in and we were fortunate to have a helping third hand. The local yacht broker at the yard noticed Alizée and recognized her as a Dudley Dix design. A little Googling around and he landed on this blog! When we pulled into our slip, he said "You're Bill Connor, aren't you?" I felt so famous. Blush. Awe shucks. We had a blow coming in and he helped us get all trussed up in the slip to avoid banging around on the pilings as the wind freshened and shifted all around. Many thanks! He also offered to go out sailing and show us around the local waters. If only we had sails ...

Tomorrow is move in day and we begin living full time on Alizée.