Becalmed

We made it home from our sailing vacation but the last bit was a challenge. The engine broke so we had to sail from Cape Elizabeth home, which isn't a problem in nice weather, but it wasn't - lumpy 4' following seas, winds light and variable. It turned out we could have just waited but the prediction was for the seas to continue to rise and the wind to shift to dead on our nose so we would have to tack (zigzag) upwind. We aren't as young as we were so we tried to play it safe. The first day was miserable and a bit scary and the second day, it took us 17 hours to go 26 miles, with us wondering if the tide was going to eventually carry us onto the shore if the wind didn't return in time. My husband spent hours holding the flogging jib open with the boathook because the seas were better but still rolling us back and forth while I tried to keep us pointing in the right direction. After awhile, we lost steerage and went around and around the same lobster buoy for an hour until the wind sprang up at the end of the afternoon. That got us around Cape Ann but then it died with the sun, as usual, and we drifted slowly towards the rocks of the back shore, listening to the surf, until the wind came back around midnight. We arrived in the harbor shortly thereafter and discovered it's pretty hard to sail onto a mooring in the dark because it's hard to judge your speed when you can't see. It took us a number of tries. Then I spent another hour and a half trying to persuade the dog it was ok to pee on the deck. Even demonstrating didn't work. Poor lambie just couldn't. He'd been angelic all day, staying where we asked him to, not getting in the way, telling me when he was feeling seasick so I could feed him more ginger and biscuits. And it was too dark and too far to get him ashore at the end : ( Anyway, the whole trip wouldn't have been a problem if we'd had better wind and sea forecasts or a better combination of seas and winds. The rest of the trip was uneventful and then we made up for it at the end.  And despite it all, we don't want to stop sailing because somehow, being on the water feels better than being on land. Except when it isn't, like the last two days.