“Haul in the line! … Wait, no. Let go of the line!”.
We had just minutes ago passed under the golden gate, passing around our bottle of rum, toasting each other, the trip, and posing for the picture … which actually was several pictures. One was being taken every two seconds from the camera we had tied to a small kite behind the boat. Imagine, a time-lapse video of us leaving the gate from a camera 50 feet behind the boat!
We had actually rehearsed this kite-camera trick a few months ago on our trip to China Camp, and despite the camera whipping left and right (sometimes performing a loop-d-loop) the pictures had turned out incredible. These ones would be epic, just us the golden gate, and nothing but water. Then, the kite hit the water. We ran to the cockpit and pulled on the line hoping to lift the kite from the water (all that did was cut up our hands), we quickly changed strategy and let go of the line. Two minutes under the gate and we we were about to practice a man (or rather kite) overboard drill.
I’ll spare the details but as you can tell from the post, none of those pictures are attached. We retrieved the kite flawlessly (previous man-overboard drills paid off), the camera however was no longer attached. The first of thousands of things we’re bound to lose overboard.
Instead (assuming a picture is worth a thousand words) I’ll recreate 10.4% of one of them:
Picture San Francisco bay, glowing in the warmest day of the year, the three of us up on deck admiring the bridge above us, the pacific in front and the city behind. The wind just strong enough to help us make way against the now flooding current, but still light for the bay. We take turns saluting each other and swigging from the leather pouch of milestone rum, and looking back at the city, family and friends we were about to leave in our wake. The way I’m describing it sounds epic but actually it felt really normal. Normal, exciting and absolutely perfect.
Thanks to everyone who came out to our send off events, it really made our day having you there.
