“jump on” Carmine said “… and throw the line on the pontoon”.
Here I am, looking at Eidos slowly slipping out of our berth for the first time with us, excited and trying to catch all the feelings of this moment I have been waiting for long time. I’m so happy and it’s like all the fatigue of the work done so far is melting down, we are sliding on the mirror of the calm water of the marina.
Very lite wind of this warm winter’s day is welcoming us in the perfect condition and Eidos becomes a small gentle vessel sailing peacefully with few dolphins around. Carmine and Marcel start opening the sail cover and help Mark that is at the winch to hoist the mainsail, while I stay at the helm. It is a gigantic sail and it takes a lot of time for us to untangle the reefs lines that have been badly prepared. After a while, drifting in front of the city seafront, we decide to tide them up later and move on with one reef on and open the genoa. With only 7 knots of true wind we sail at 7 knots of speed easily. We look at each other smiling and understand that this cat likes it a lot!
On the way back the list of things to check and fix is long: reefs lines, throttles, windless, autopilot, … but is has been an amazing first day out and I cannot wait to sail again and again and again …
Coming back to the mooring for the first time with a 9 meters wide cat is challenging but better than we thought, at least with no wind!
Four guys from the marina are waiting for us to help with the mooring lines. I feel a lot of kindness and support here, I really like this marina and the nice people we have met in Cape Town.
I ask Marcel for a comment and he says that sailing with Eidos is great and very comfortable but he got intimidated by the size of mainsail “it’s too big for me…”.
In the evening, after few beers and considerations Carmine and myself read the first day out story on Timetama log book. It was exactly 4 days less than 16 years ago! Same exciting story even if there was nothing to fix on Timetama, except ourselves… we were starting the adventure that completely changed our lives.