7mm shy of freedom

Stress mixed with terror. That's about the only way to describe standing
on the deck of your boat while two 30 year old Russian cranes try to
rotate it 90 degrees, lift it out over the water and set it down. All
this, without tangling the mast, banging the hull or flat out dropping it.
It wasn't my intention to be on this death ride. I would have preferred
to watch the cranes from a distance, but while I was on deck helping
attach the cranes, they started moving it -- leaving 3 of us to figure out
where to jump if thing went wrong.

The story of getting our boat out of the yard is quite a drama. The boat
can only be put in during a narrow window during peak high tide.
Otherwise they'll just set you down on the dry beach. One of the crane
operators showed up 30 minutes PAST high tide, so we scrambled to get the
boat in the water before it was too shallow. Somehow inside of 20 minutes
we had the boat in the water, straps coming off and engine running. We
only lightly bumped the sand once, but another 15 minutes longer and we
would have been stuck there high and dry.

Somehow, someway, we escaped damaging our boat and got ourselves anchored
safely. After 5 months of sitting around in a house, it felt really good
to be on the boat. It was like we had never left.

You might be wondering about the subject of this post. Well, 5 days
before we were set to launch I had a minor kidney stone attack. It turns
out I have a 7mm stone (not too big). We debated about not launching the
boat, but due to the size of the stone, and how we'd have to wait 30 days
for the tides to be right again, we decided to splash our boat.

As soon as this stone passes we'll feel safe to head back into the wilds.
I'm trying to look at our long string a bad luck as a payment for the luck
of a safe transit in and out of the yard.