9-9.

Beautiful sunny day - time to go sailing! 

My car pulled the trailer and boat like a champ.  I could hardly tell I was towing something.  Everything made it down to the ramp in one piece.

Lolita Gomez with her pennant.  You can see more of her art at www.dailythreads.etsy.com. 

Notice what else is happening here - I am struggling to push the rudder stock on (next time I'm bringing some grease) because the pintles and gudgeons are so tight that it is a long process of swaying the rudder back and forth while pushing down until it finally slides into place.  Also Rachel is dunking her head in the background!  

Rigged and ready to sail...

...except can't forget the champagne!

And I shared some with the Blue Tang since I don't think we did anything special for it's maiden voyage years ago.

A sea mirage.

Unfortunately we didn't have the breeziest day for sailing, so we spent some time just floating, but we did happen upon the occasional burst of wind, especially right before and right after lunch.

Brown pelicans.

Pelican and cormorants on the buoy between the Swan and Walt's boat.

See if you can find the osprey perched at the top of a tree.

Here comes Walt and Rachel with their sun-reflecting umbrella.

The osprey took off as we approached.

But the vulture stuck around, maybe hoping that in the noon heat one of our party would succumb.

We did some test tacks and jibes before coming in for lunch and got the pennant flying in the wind.

Not all Florida beaches are white sand.  Choice spot in the grasses and oyster shells.

We found a nice shady spot for lunch under cedars and palms, or in the cedar for Ross with his (un)frozen pizza.  The flies were not too bad.

There were lots of fiddler crabs on the beach.

The males sport one large pincher claw, and they aren't afraid to show it off (or use it).

Lilly calls them the prairie dogs of the coast - when you walk near them, they skitter off to their numerous holes and quickly dive out of sight.

Lilly relaxes on the sail back to the ramp.  Relaxation was short-lived due to shallow areas requiring the crew to raise and lower the centerboard and the lack of wind that required the crew to row us back in.  

The Blue Tang takes advantage of some wind to try to come to our rescue.  But we made it back on our own power (ie Ross's power).  

No videos of sailing, only herding fiddler crabs! 

For all of you who have followed along from around the world, I hope you've enjoyed seeing our boat come alive over the past year and a half or so.  It was a long, often challenging, but always fun project, and I think my dad would agree with me that we're glad it's finished so that now repairs can begin!  This is the culmination of this blog, but if you want to see pictures and read stories of future adventures on and off the Swan, feel free to check out http://www.theseaswan.blogspot.com/.  (It might take me a couple weeks to get this new blog up and running, so check back in a little while if nothing is up yet).

I also want to note the viewership of this blog.  When I started the blog, I imagined it as a way for family and friends that weren't in Tallahassee to watch the building process.  Little did I know that people from all over the world would be checking in regularly, but thanks to google and technology, I was able to keep track of where people were viewing the blog from.  Don't worry, I couldn't tell that you were checking in; just how many hits I had from each country.  There was a definite trend in the number of viewers from the top group of countries, so I like to guess that probably a good portion of these views were from people regularly checking in.  My theory is supported by knowing when people check the blog - y'all learned quickly that I usually posted on Sundays or Mondays - I could tell this by seeing huge spikes in hits on these days!

As of yesterday (so not including who sees this post), the top 10 countries (from most views first) were:

United States
Canada
Netherlands
New Zealand
Japan
Russia
Australia
France
Germany
Turkey

Of course there were hits from many more countries than this, but unfortunately google only saves the data for the top 10...

goodbye and au revoir! (At least that covers 1/2 of the countries on the list).