"Bob" wrote:


Hmm silence. Is it the "we are not going to offer an opinion because Skip
and Lydia will see it?" Or is the subject simply too painful to raise.

Maybe just too obvious. The mans boat was on the reef. What can you
say??

Having read Skip's assessment of the situation, I'd say a lot of the
problem was the newness of the cruising experience, the inadequacy of
the weather reports, and, yes, the inexperience of Lydia.
Inexperience can be remedied. On our first cruises, I also had to
rely a lot on Bob even though I had taken some sailing lessons.

The part of Skip's story where he went forward to reef was similar to
something that happened to us, except that we didn't have jack lines,
and Bob had to do it twice (during the day, but we were not setting
off on a big cruise, we were just going down around the peninsula on a
day trip). I knew that if he fell overboard I would not be able to
retrieve him. Our experience was in April in the Chesapeake so cold
water would also have been a problem. Bob was very careful, and
obviously did NOT go overboard, and installed jacklines the very next
thing. (In our defense I have to say that he did have a harness, and
we had practiced retrieving each other from the water)

We've also been in a bad storm (right after Bob's heart attack) where
he didn't listen to the weather report and I let him persuade me to
leave. I was worried about his getting rest then too, as once out
there we had nowhere to go except to keep on going as we were doing.

But by that time (we'd been cruising for 2 years and we had been
married for 43 years), I was in charge of the route planning so we
both knew where we were (we could both read the charts and the radar),
and I let him stay at the wheel all night. After we made port the
next day I insisted that he take a nap and I made him go to bed early
the next night (which he didn't want to do).