There be Dolphins

One of the things we have learned from owning lots of boats over the years is that they seldom wear out -- they generally rust away from lack of use. When you're using your boat every day it just runs great. 

The First Guy Arrives

Since December 8th we've been in Herzliya marina and have only left the dock for brief periods (5 minutes Jan 7th to have the boat hauled out and painted, another 5 minutes on Jan 26th to put it back into the slip)  so as we are preparing to start sailing again -- beginning with a trip to Turkey, we needed to get some fuel and also make sure everything worked again.

Then he called his buddy

As noted in our "Failure to Launch" blogpost, we intended to leave on February 17th and arrive in Kemer on the morning of the 19th, so on the 15th we headed out into a beautiful and warm 17 knot breeze here in Herzliya to test our systems. Other than the sails looking a little dirty from the Scirocco winds (that have a ridiculous amount of dirt in them from the Sahara desert) everything performed as it should.

And things snowballed from there

After sailing out a half hour or so, we turned back in and encountered a dolphin, then a pair, then four. Here are some photos of them playing in our bow wake. We were about a mile off shore doing a little more than 8 knots through the water under sail.


Marina shot a couple of videos that are pretty cool as well. They can be seen at:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=143UcY0iJH0  and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6hSxdGEUX8