Dawn on Friday, April 3 – Good Friday:

Friday and Saturday were mellow days. The weather wasn’t good, so we didn’t have any burning desire to go out. Here was a rainbow in between showers.

Eager to use up all the food in the fridge/freezer prior to our upcoming haul out, Christi spent most of both days cooking. Also knowing that we wouldn’t be able to do laundry onboard for a while, she did as much laundry as she possibly could. Eric continued to get things ready for the upcoming boat work. He also put chlorine dioxide in the tanks to do a much needed shock treatment on the tanks/pipes.

On Friday afternoon, the Yacht Tech guy came by to review the work that Eric wanted to have done. We were surprised that he was working since so many people took Good Friday off. In the later afternoon, we visited with the couple on the N-55 docked next to us, Rehmat. They left on Saturday.

On Saturday evening, we had dinner with Deitmar from Ocean Posse and a couple of his life-long friends at Belle’s. Brian and Nancy, the current owner and crew of N-46 Egret, joined us. It was great to see Deitmar again and lovely to get to know the new people. We were the first to arrive. Here were Eric and Keith as we waited.

Easter Sunday was a busy day. Christi got up early and went to a sunrise the service at the Juno Beach pier. Thousands of people attended. Parking was a bit challenging, but she managed to find a spot within reasonable walking distance.

Not long after Christi returned to Kosmos, Brian from Egret picked us up in his dinghy and took us to see Egret in the anchorage. Seeing her again brought back a lot of memories.

We only briefly mentioned this in our blog, but the previous owners of Egret, Scott and Mary Flanders, were instrumental in helping us be successful Nordhavn owners and cruisers. They are right behind Jeff Merrill in terms of the people who helped us the most.

We met them at the Nordhavn Atlantic Rally. At that point in time, we had a refundable deposit on Kosmos and the deadline for when it would become non-refundable was soon approaching. Since neither Christi nor Eric were experienced boaters, we were agonizing about whether this was the right lifestyle choice for us. Milt Baker had encouraged us to volunteer at the rally and sit through the seminars to help us decide if this was what we really wanted.

Egret was one of the boats participating in the rally. Scott and Mary generously invited us to stay with them on their boat for a weekend so they could show us the ropes of how to maintain, trouble-shoot and repair the various components aboard a Nordhavn. It was an intensive training where we started at the anchor on the bow and methodically worked our way back, going into detail with each component. In addition to helping us understand what we were getting into in terms of the boat maintenance, they helped us understand what cruising life entailed and gave us a lot of pointers on how to be successful in the cruising lifestyle. We owe a lot of our success to their patient and wise mentoring. There are more details abut the rally and our time with the Flanders in the Prologue in Part 1 of The Unexpected Circumnavigation.

Anyway, Brian pointed out the upgrades that he’d made and we chatted about various aspects of Nordhavn ownership and cruising life. It was a nice visit. We wish we could have stayed longer, but we needed to head over to Johnny and Joanne’s for Easter dinner. Joanne cooked a fabulous meal and we had a fantastic time with them. Their neighborhood had a lot of wild rabbits, and quite a few of them they came out into the grass while we were outside. It felt fitting to see so many bunnies on Easter.