Last weekend is one to remember. We had two well-known cruising couples aboard Mosaic: Sailing Totem and Adventure Adrift.

Cruising Systems Review with Sailing Totem

On Friday, we were lucky enough to nab a 2 1/2 hour time slot with the Sailing Totem crew while they were in town for one last stint to say farewell to their son who’s here for college. Jamie chatted with us about some specific concerns that we have and helped with prioritizing a project list for our trip north next year.

Funny enough, we were so into the conversations that we forgot to take pictures. I took a grand total of two photos of Jamie while he was here and didn’t get any pictures at all of Behan or their girls. (Remember the last time we met with Totem at the BBQ over the summer? Yeah, we forgot to get pictures that day too! We’re not very good at this apparently!)

Jamie explains rigging a preventer on the boom aboard our sailboat Mosaic.

Jamie explains rigging a preventer aboard Mosaic.

Breakfast & Boat Tour with Adventure Adrift

We recently signed up to support Adventure Adrift through their Patreon account (they’re one of just two that we support in this way) and, because of this, we were privy to the information that Ty and Hillary were going to be in Portland for a very short time period this weekend before heading back to their boat in Mexico. We sent them a message asking if they might want to get together and we were pretty excited when they said yes!

We met up with them on Sunday morning, with one other patron, and had breakfast at the marina cafe. Then we all trooped down to Mosaic for a tour and more chatting. It was super fun to show them our boat- they seemed to really love her! They’ve been boat shopping lately and have been aboard many sailboats over the past several months so it was really cool to hear them talk about some of the great qualities of our Mosaic.

Having learned our lesson on the photos with Totem, I wasn’t about to let this opportunity slip away without some pics!

Adventure Adrift crew and Mosaic Voyage family pose for selfie aboard the sailboat SV Mosaic in Portland OR.

Adventure Adrift’s Ty and Hillary pose with us aboard Mosaic.

Mosaic Voyage crew family of four along with Adventure Adrift cruising couple after breakfast at marina in Portland

Adventure Adrift cruising couple chatting with mosaic Voyage crew aboard SV Mosaic in Portland OR

Brenden and I connected very briefly with Ty and Hillary before they left Portland on their cruising adventure in 2016. We had tried to make plans to meet before they left, but this was all just as we were moving aboard Mosaic and we didn’t quite realize how soon they were leaving. Before we knew it, they were gone! And we had missed our chance to meet them in person.

For the past two years, we’ve continued to kick ourselves for not making that meeting happen before they left. So having the chance to meet them and chat for a couple hours this past weekend was really amazing. These two are really amazing people, very easy to chat with and open to sharing their experience and adventure. In short, it was GREAT!

Sailing as a Family

We also got another chance to get Mosaic out on the river and get her sails up last Saturday. Unfortunately, we had to choose between no wind and no rain or some wind and lots of rain. We picked the wind and rain … and we got DRENCHED.

Kali ended up just hanging out down below the whole time, actually fussing and crying most of the time because she apparently really needed a nap but wouldn’t go sleep. Evan stayed up top sailing with us, despite the rain, and we had some fun. Ultimately, we called it quits after about 45 minutes and headed back into the slip soaking wet. But, at least we got out and collected that little bit more experience sailing our boat on our own!

I took these couple pictures before the rain started really coming down.

Sailing in the rain aboard SV Mosaic on the Columbia River in October

Sailing in the rain aboard SV Mosaic on the Columbia River in October

And, thankfully, the next afternoon, the sun came out and I was able to pull the jib up and get her all dried out and put away.

Drying our job out after a day of sailing in the rain in the PNW

And, on a personal note, I am beyond grateful that even with ALL of this going on this past weekend, I was able to find the time to meet up with a close friend that lives out of town TWICE over the weekend. I haven’t seen my dear friend, Felica, for seven years since she had to move out of the state.

It was SO good to see her, let her meet my Kali-girl and chat with the much-grown-up-since-she-last-saw-him Evan, and show her my floating home.

Best. Weekend. Ever.

Two women standing on the bow of a Fuji 40 sailboat arm around each other for the photo

As always, thanks for reading! Have a great week, friends! ~Rachel