Nymeria is back!

After months of waiting on parts, and getting though the holidays. The wait may finally be over. Shortly after I posted last week, we hit the starter button and Nymeria immediately fired back up. I find it fairly amazing just how much of a weight got lifted that moment. Suddenly the sadness and worry of the last few months melted away and confidence began to build.

We’ve had a fair amount of work done since Harvest Moon. Aside from the engine issues, a new radar was installed, we had to replace the refrigerator that died during the race, and we added an external removable freezer as well. As with all little problems, both of those installs ended up bigger and longer than expected, but really went fairly smoothly. Since on a boat everything is custom, the refrigerator took a few months to get installed, so we bought a Dometic Portable 12v Fridge/Freezer as a temporary fridge while we waited for the real one to get installed. Then, we put in a new plug for it, and now its an external freezer that we can actually keep some meat for more than a few days, make some ice for beverages, and even have some ice cream!

The radar was a bonus. Our old radar worked just fine, but my father, after having so much fun on the race, decided that we needed a big Christmas/birthday/congratulations on the race present. He somewhat forced us to get a new one, you know, by paying for it. This involved adding a new pedestal to mount a new Garmin nav/radar display. This had unfortunately sat unused and un-calibrated for over a month while Nymeria was stuck in the slip.

Once we fired up the motor, we were desperate to get out and play. So as soon as we could, we were going. Rain or shine it didn’t matter. Sunday was supposed to be overcast and rainy, but untied the lines and went for a day cruise anyway. Once we got out to the bay we spent almost an hour just calibrating the new toys, and then spent several hours just quietly sailing around the bay. The wind was light, but the day turned out way better than expected. The sun came out, the clouds went away, and we just cruised.

Nymeria sailed great. I cant ask for anything more. We didn’t do much, but we needed everything we did. A problem free day of sailing. A fresh cold bottle of champagne once we dock back up to the slip.