Upon our arrival and opening of the trailer, Trevor getting really excited about riging!
Better late than never! I decided to write a detail story about this year's steeplechase and never got to finishing it until now. Stay tuned for Part 2 and 3
We were extremely excited about this year's Key Largo Steeplechase. Knowing we were more prepared than the previous year gave us the confidence to know we would actually be competitive this year rather than just trying to complete the race.
However, my excitment was soon halted when 6 hours before our flight I found out that the plane was already delayed, not because of bad weather in the Northeast, but because of snow in New Orleans! The airline informed me that we might not be able to make our connecting flight and all scenarios didn't place us in Key Largo until noon or later on Friday. With already a full day of boat work planned I knew this was going to be a huge problem.
Despite the grim situation, we decided to go to the airport and just go with the flow. Our flight was infact delayed 3 hours but this gave us plenty of time to run our tab (exactly what we didn't need to be doing!) up at the T.G.I. Fridays at the airport. During this time we were joined by many other delayed travelers including a local Newport Laser sailor we know. Many interesting topics can be brought up at an aiport bar, but my favorite was that this was truly a conspiracy by the airlines to meet a quota set by the bars in the terminal to sell alcoholic beverages.
Finally after the long delay we got on the plane to be greeted by 3 heavily intoxicated middle-aged mothers who insisted on not letting us catch any rest during the flight. Luckily, 21 people from our Providence to Orlando flight were connecting to our flight to Fort Lauderdale so they held the plane 2 and a half hours. Needless to say, the people that were sitting on the plane were not happy campers when we all got there. We were not bothered by this as we were just glad to be getting to Lauderdale that night!
Upon arriving in Lauderdale, a friend picked us up and arranged for us to stay at a mutual friend's house. Thanks to Jeff and Nick for this!
At 7AM, it seemed like we had just gone to bed (probably because we just had) when I got a text message from Chris Titcomb of Team Accelerated Chaos saying him and his crew, Trevor Burd, were on their way. We struggled of the couch and into the car to head down to Key Largo. On our way down, I cannot fail to mention our finding an Ihop and stopping for breakfast as no real trip can be complete without a huge breakfast!
After stuffing our stomachs, we finished our trip to Key Largo, picked up a fellow catamaran sailor's truck (Thanks Jack!) to move our box trailer from Tiki Watersports to the Carribean Club to start setting up our boats.
Our list of boat work for the day consisted of removing our existing self-tacker and replacing it with the current style, removing and replacing our tramp lacing slugs, putting new lines (courtesy of Paraloc Rope) and blocks (courtesy of Ronstan), and much more. Our boats were also completely disassembled in the trailer! We had to watch as everyone went sailing all day while our mast was not ready to go up until around 5PM. By 5:30 the sun had gone down and we no longer had any light to work on the boat and knew we would have to be up early in the morning to finish the work.
As always, registration and the skipper's meeting were held at 6PM at Rick White and Mary Well's house. After attending that, we went out to dinner then retired to the hotel from last minute GPS and chart review then much needed quality time with our pillows.
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