There is no more difficult way to travel one hundred miles than to sail it. Riding bikes would have been a breeze. Jogging with Ouest on my shoulders, no problem. Sailing. My goodness, I’m beat.

Didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. Ali was up with a crying Lowe most of the night. He got sick too now. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was going to get the transmission coupler fixed.

So anyway, the sun came up, beautiful morning, and I crawled inside the bowels of the engine compartment. It didn’t take me long to realize what had gone wrong. Explaining it would be laborious, so I’ll just sum it up by saying that we hadn’t placed a bolt behind the pin which keeps the shaft and the coupler together. A bolt behind the pin would keep it from ever sliding backwards out of its space. Instead we had only installed a bolt on top of the pin. Problem being, as I found out this morning, is that if that bolt comes loose like this one had, then the pin can simply slide its way out, which it had.

With the pin gone the shaft was free to slide backwards right out of the coupler. The amazing thing was that this must have happened last night just as I was finishing backing down on the anchor. If it has to happen there really is no better place to be.

I removed the coupler, gathered up the loose pin, aligned the coupler and shaft, squeezed the pin in, found a big bolt and nut, installed them behind the pin, tightened up the other two bolts that keep the whole thing from wiggling around, and then got to the part that had me up all night long worrying, sliding the shaft forward again.

But the sun shines on a dog’s something or rather every now and then, and today was this dog’s turn. With the coupler hooked back up to the shaft I was able to get some leverage and the shaft simply slid right straight back into place.

After a half-hearted effort at trying to convince Ali that this would indeed work we set off two hours late. Secretly inside I was thrilled and consider this to be one of my finest on the fly in the middle of nowhere repairs. And it came complete with some bailing wire thrown in on the bolts. Because no good repair is complete without bailing wire.

So we set off and had a nice thirteen knot wind on the beam. We were running along downwind with the main and the yankee when the wind quickly climbed up on us. Ali was down below trying to put Lowe down for a nap, so I strapped Ouest in to her car seat and went about trying to reef us. The wind was up around twenty-five knots now so I thought I’d make a quick turn up into the wind, drop the sails down a reef or two, turn back downwind and carry on.

Seemed simple enough in theory. But as I turned and we came beam on to the wind and waves the boat heeled right over to the rail and we were screaming along with water flying everywhere. Ouest was getting splashed but didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

I eventually got us in irons, furled the yankee all the way, and went about dropping the main for a reef. But man that main was flailing so badly I couldn’t get anywhere near getting a reef line on. It sounded like the main was about to explode so I gave up and pulled the whole thing down in a heap. A heap because I haven’t made lazy jacks yet, and flaking a sail in wind is, for me, an impossibility.

So I scared the crap out of Ali for no good reason, got Ouest salty, and finally got us turned back around. Ten minutes later as we rolled sideways down a big curler I heard a loud ping and turned to see the brace between the two davits bust a weld and slice through the dinghy tube. Sweet. I grabbed the brace before it could cut it up any more, but couldn’t let go, and couldn’t reach anything helpful. I called for Ali but she was down below playing with Lowe and couldn’t hear a thing. “Ali! Ali!” I yelled for five minutes while Ouest just stared at me from her chair.

Ali finally wandered past the door, saw me, and came out to help. I got the brace tied off and out of the way and did my best to secure the now one-third deflated dinghy. Three tubes. With the size of the following seas and the wind only seeming to increase I was beginning to feel like we were going to end up losing the dinghy today. I could no longer tie it up securely so that with each roll it would fly from side to side violently. Enough so that another welded brace popped off. I laid out all the lines for the dinghy so that they would be easy for me to cut free if the whole thing busted loose.

Needless to say we need a whole new dinghy davit setup. Clearly the current one is not going to work for us. Maybe if we had a much smaller dinghy and a two horsepower engine, but not like this. I don’t want to think about one, just how ugly this contraption will have to be, and two, just how expensive.

The rest of the day passed without any major mishaps. The kids are an incredible amount of work to care for on a moving sailboat though. We really have to be hands on with them the entire time. And by hour eight both Ali and I are about ready to jump off and swim the rest of the way. Has to be easier than sailing.

More than once today Ali said, “I miss our cat.” True, the cat would have handled today’s conditions much much better. Big following seas just don’t work on a mono the way they do on a cat. We would have been loving life today on the cat.

Later in the afternoon Ouest started leaning in the doorway and bellowing out, “Ay-yee! Ay-yee!” She learned today that her mama has an actual name and also that it is okay to simply yell it out when you need something.