Overnight Adventure at the Dock

It's been a long slow ride to get Noah to like sailing. We had many issues to overcome (fear of wind, fear of boats, fear of high tide, his father's annoying enthusiasm) but we eventually did. Noah now sails with me and enjoys the boat. All good news.

On our last sail of 2008, he went down below right after we left the dock and took a nap. This must have lit a lightbulb in his head. The next day while talking about sailing he asked if we could sleep on the boat, I said, "of course, you took a nap yesterday" and he got more specific, "can we go night night on the boat?". "Ummm, heck yeah we can!"

I envision weekend family vacations swinging from the hook by Angel Island or going off to the BVIs and possibly retiring early, getting some homeschooling books on tape and heading around the world. But you gotta start slowly. So we had an "Overnight Adventure" on the boat Friday night.

I rushed home from work, packed Noah, a heater, some sleeping bags, a laptop, and lots of good snacks and we went to the boat. We saw Chris in the parking lot when we got there...at the time, Noah was in the dock cart covered in sleeping bags and pillows so Chris didn't immediately know he was there. We talked all the way down the dock but separated when we got to our boats.



Noah and I had some serious plans to follow up on. We played Bakugon, pirates, cards, and assorted mixtures of those games. At one point, we even had one of Camille's old My Little Ponies shooting laser blasts with her tail. We ate badly, had all the apple juice we wanted and kept two heaters going full blast. It was the perfect Friday Night at the Dock.



At bedtime, I got Noah in his pajamas, built a nest in the v-berth and set up the laptop with a short bakugon movie. We read the three books we have on board twice each and fell asleep with the howling of 20 knots of wind in the rigging to keep us company.