A Day In The Life

            Hello there world. Its Cody today writing to you from the beautiful Cooper Island. This is the same island that we were "stranded" at last January and in the 4 days we were here I fell head over heels in love with this island. It is a small island with a population of maybe 75, barely. It has one main bay with a great little beach restaurant and a small boutique. The restaurant is framed by a vibrant green hill rising up sharply behind it. The southern side is a large hill with rock cliffs facing the sea. Me and William are hoping to go climbing there later today if we can finish all of our school work in time. The north side looks the same as the south side just a bit smaller. This little slice of heaven was worth the trip over from Peter Island earlier this morning but it was no slice of pie getting here.
            We had quite the day yesterday when we made our first attempt at anchoring and found that the anchor had not been used in quite some time. At first glance the chain just looks very rusty, but then as we began to let it out we discovered that after about 100 feet parts of the chain had become so rusted that they began to stick together. So we had approximately 100 feet of chain and multiple lengths of chain that had rusted into huge knots. What better way is there to fix something than to pound the living day lights out of it with a hammer? There isn't one. After an hour of pounding and oiling my parents finally got another 50 feet out of the thing. We then proceed to actually drop the anchor and get it to catch. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I cleaned the algae off our left hull and will being cleaning the right one at some point this weekend, got a hair cut from my mom which looks pretty good and we all had some great chicken caccitore (catch-a-tori). It will forever amaze me how my parents can create such great food anywhere in the world and with any size kitchen. That was our night.
           We planned to leave Peter around 8 this morning but due to our battery's running low and an alarm going off in the middle of the night that didn't happen. But the battery's running low also meant that we had to run the generator that is right behind my bed. Now this generator is not a gently humming type deal. This thing is LOUD. So when it promptly kicked on at 5 in the morning, I promptly sat bolt upright in bed and thought we were going to crash. After I realized what was actually happening I rolled over and tried to catch a few more z's before wake up call. We ended up leaving at around 9:30 and headed out to open sea. Today was our fist chance to actually get our sails up and it was quite the adventure. When we got out into some good wind me and my dad headed up front to put up the main. Well after some serious pulling and cranking we got it up. Only to realize that our very bottom cleat was not attached to the sail which made the bottom part of the sail flail around instead of being tight on the mast. So we reefed it, which is just putting the sail up 2/3 of the way. Then we put the jib out, which is the sail at the very front of the boat that is a bit smaller than the main. Well our jib seems to have a personal vendetta against me. We got it up no problem but then when we were tacking it got caught on some loose rope on the main. I jumped up to free it and when i did the rope snapped back and whipped me right along the back leaving a huge welt and a little bit of blood. It hurt. A lot. But its one of those things that hurts for a bit and then goes away so I'm fine now but it will be leaving a rather large mark. We made it to Cooper without any other problems which was great.
           Now I don't want this to sound like a list of all the bad things that have happened to us so I will say that all of these things have taught us how to be better sailors. We are learning from our mistakes and enjoying our victories. If there's one thing I have learned so far it is that when bad things happen you must learn from those things and move on. Otherwise you will get caught up in all your failures and never accomplish anything. So there's your dose of daily wisdom. Don't focus on the rope that seems to want to end you, focus on grabbing that sucker by the throat and tightening that sail.