Sail Far Live Free

This is a brief but important post I should've made long ago. We decided very early this year that the name of our sailboat is to be "Hannabel", which comes from simply combining the first four letters from our daughter Hannah's name and the last four letters from our daughter Isabel's name. Tricky, huh? In any case, our beautiful little boat is hence forth to be known as the sailing vessel Hannabel!

This past Sunday marked the first trip on Hannabel that was more than a mere daysail. Erin, Hannah, Isabel, my mom, dad and I all shoved off from the docks at North Shore Marina at about 11:00am and headed north to Muskegon for lunch. The weather called for light air (5-10kts) out of the north, so we knew might be in for a long, slow trip of only 24 total miles. Still, we were eager to get some mileage beneath our keel so we worked our way windward...for about 3 hours. The trip to Muskegon was uneventful, as we munched on my mom's almond bars and basked in the sunny (but cool!) 1st day of June. Just west of Grand Haven we observed a couple of the USCG boats practicing towing drills as we sailed by at a very leisurely pace. We pulled into the Muskegon breakwater and channel around 2:30pm and motored our way to Dockers. The food was good, even if they did take the very memorable calamari off the menu. There was also a live blues band and plenty of activities for the girls. The ...