Leaving it all behind

We left the Port Aransas channel and now we are in the open seas. It was exciting and just like in the movies--we raised the sails up, the theme music started playing, I was standing on the bow with my arms spread like I’m flying...

The waters of the Gulf were calm, with gentle swells taking us slowly up and down. We saw bunch of dolphins playing around our boat.

Later, the reality kicked in and I realized that it will be like this, up and down, with not really much to do, for a long, long time.

The wind is good, the only problem is that it’s blowing from the wrong direction--right into our nose. So we will have to zig-zag our way into the wind. We decided to start going a bit more south--that way we can also avoid some of the Gulf Stream (the current goes around Yucatan and that is also flowing against us).