To Lift or Not to Lift

The Skipper and I had the most amazing day of beauty today.  We decided to take our sailboat, Virtue, to Glovertown Marina for the winter.  So at the crack of dawn we dropped our mooring at Norton’s Cove without a breath of wind and motored to Glovertown.

As you can see from the photographs, we didn’t get to set sail at all, as the wind stayed unusually vacant all morning.  Gorgeous views were all around us the whole day, and we really felt like we were on vacation.

We arrived at the marina at peak tide- the water is pretty shallow here- which gave us just six inches of water under our keel as we backed in over the straps waiting to lift Virtue out of the water.  At that point, we realized that we needed to release our back-stays in order to allow the TraveLift crane to lift Virtue up and onto the hard.  That was not something the Skipper was willing to take on in a hurry.  It would mean dismounting out radar, which is attached to the stays, and compromising the ability to keep the mast standing throughout this procedure.  A decision was made to return to our mooring once again.

So Virtue is still afloat on her mooring in Norton’s Cove, and we got to enjoy twice the time in our lovely boat.

The weather stayed incredible throughout the day, and we picked up our mooring just after sunset (I think I’ll look into glow-in-the-dark bobbers for next year to mark the mooring) and we even got to pull out a sail on the way home.

Virtue will have to wait to start hibernation until another day.