This morning it was windy, then both windy and rainy, then the wind died and there was light rain for a few hours. Once the wind died, it was hot and humid. Eric cleaned the bottom.
The wind was forecast to shift direction, so he made sure that the anchor was well set, which was easy to do in such amazingly clear water.
This week has been fun. On Saturday, we drove up to Pennsylvania to see the leaves change color. We stopped at an Italian restaurant, which I thought was going to be meh but it turned out to be really really good. Afterwards we went to Gettysburg. Mom promised that we wouldn’t go to a museum, but dad had other plans! We went to the museum of the Gettysburg address. I learned that I was very bored and that my parents are liars (just kidding). Mom is saying I have to put something I learned, so I learned that Abraham Lincoln was not the main speaker at the dedication of the cemetery where he gave the address.
Friday, October 31 — This morning it felt like 38 degrees with wind chill factor. Christi had a hard time dragging herself outside to watch the sunrise. Because of the cold, she didn’t stay outside long, but she was glad she at least got to enjoy a few minutes of the lovely dawn, Here were a couple shots:
We were pleased to report that this morning, the flooding was gone and all was back to normal in the marina. While Christi and Keith did school, Eric cleaned the sea strainers. There was lots of mud in them and two live fish! One fish was long and skinny. He thought it looked like a snake and wondered if it was an eel.
Thursday, October 30 — Yesterday, morning, we spent a long time discussing whether we should leave Annapolis today for Bermuda. The forecasts promised good weather for the passage. But… Hurricane Melissa, which had decimated Jamaica on Tuesday as a category 5, was still in the Caribbean. It had calmed down to a category 3 and was en route to Bermuda. It was expected to calm down to a tropical storm by the time it hit Bermuda and would be long gone by the time Kosmos arrived. But we’d learned the hard way that when there was a hurricane in the broader area, it could make local forecasts inaccurate, so we ultimately decided that the forecasts couldn’t be trusted and it was best to stay put.
Meanwhile, a storm was coming from the north that was supposed to hit tonight. While Christi and Keith were doing school, Eric spent a long time adjusting the lines and added 4 more lines in anticipation of the storm. For perspective to help understand the tide swings, the first photo was taken near low tide, the second photo near high tide.
continued… Three weeks after the battle ended, Gettysburg attorney David Willis wrote to the Pennsylvania governor and proposed a new cemetery location in Gettysburg where the soldiers in the temporary graves could be properly buried. Wills got the approval from the governor and purchased the 17-acres of land. He hired a landscape architect, who designed the cemetery as a semi-circle, with soldiers of each state buried together in distinct sections.
Moving the bodies from the temporary graves to the cemetery sounded like it was a tough job. Wills paid contractors $1.59 per body moved. 3,555 bodies were moved within two years. It sounds like they were diligent to make sure all the Union soldiers bodies were moved… and it sounds like many Confederate soldiers bodies were overlooked for a decade. After the overlooked bodies were finally exhumed, they weren’t buried at the cemetery in Gettysburg — instead, they were shipped south.