Tuesday, October 28 — The last three days have been mellow. Now that it is so cold in the mornings, Christi has been finding it difficult to drag herself out of the warm bed to watch the sun rise. Instead, she falls back to sleep and misses the sun rises altogether.
On Sunday morning, Eric ran wing engine again to check to see if it was leaking exhaust. At first, it did smoke a little more, but he determined that was paint. After a few minutes, the smoking stopped Eric was happy to report that the wing engine exhaust was indeed fixed. In the early afternoon, Christi ran a few errands, including a trip to the closest grocery store, Giant. In the mid-afternoon, the Tiki kids came over to play board games with Keith. Here was a couple photos showing how beautiful the short drive between our marina and Tiki’s boat yard was.
However, it was too cold to stand idly, so she wound up skipping the sunrise in favor of going back to the warm boat.
Yesterday morning, Eric polished the second tank of fuel and rinsed down boat while Keith and Christi did school. At noon, Eric picked up the rental car. Our paravane fish were rusting and he wanted to get them sanded and repainted. He loaded fish in car and took them to the nearby boat yard for an estimate. The person who would be doing the job wasn’t in and told him to come back later. Next, he went to West Marine.
For lunch, we wanted to go to a highly rated restaurant called Grumpy’s, which served Thai food and donuts. We entered the name into Maps, and the cafe popped up as being in the same shopping center as West Marine.
Yesterday morning, Eric was busy with more boat maintenance. He changed the batteries in the refrigerator sensors. He unpacked the lazarette in order to access the wireless temperature sensor for the inverter blower and changed the batteries in it. Eric was relieved that the system remembered all the settings and he didn’t need to reprogram the settings.
We have two modes of operation: anchoring and marina. When we’re in a marina, some of the gear that we need for anchoring gets stowed in the dinghy. He unpacked the dinghy so that he could work on it. Then he tested the new dinghy motor battery that he’d bought at the boat show (it had arrived via UPS a couple of days ago) and confirmed it worked.
Next he tackled the handles. Our dinghy has 6 handles that were factory installed. As we’d already mentioned, two had broken. While we were in Norfolk, Eric had purchased special line specifically for the handle repair project. He installed the lines and the handles (the one he’d purchased and the hose). Much to his delight, the hose worked great as a handle — almost as good as the one we’d bought.
The black one is the purchased handle, the red one is the hose.
When he was done, he put all the stuff away that had come out of the dinghy and the lazarette, which was a significant task.
At one point, we all took a break from chores/school so we could go say our goodbyes to Blue Heeler, who were leaving today to start heading south. Since we were going to the Eastern Caribbean and they were going to The Bahamas, we likely wouldn’t see them again. The hardest part about boating is leaving the friends that have been made.
After we finished chores/school, we went to The Market for lunch. Now that the boat show was over, the tents and other obstructions were being removed, and we were starting to see what the City Dock area actually looked like.
Tuesday, October 14 — Sunday night was really rainy, but by the Monday morning, the precipitation slowed down to a drizzle. It was drizzly and cool all day, making it a great day for boat projects. Eric went back to the wing engine exhaust project. He undid the hoses and tightened the wing engine exhaust elbow. When he tested it, he was frustrated to see that there was still debris in the air. But after inspecting it more closely, he’d determined it was probably smoke from the paint; he’s pretty sure that the exhaust was properly put back together and wasn’t leaking. He’ll run it some more over the next few days to be certain.
Once Keith was done with his school work, Eric and Keith went to a restaurant called the Iron Rooster, which was located near The Market. Christi stayed aboard to work on her land-life project.
Friday, Sep. 19 — We again wanted to get an early start on our passage, so we got up at 0530. Much to our dismay, the mid-stateroom toilet was broken. Unfortunately, there was no time to worry about it this morning. Fortunately, we have two heads (bathrooms), so we were fine. Here was the crescent moon and a nearby planet glowing brightly pre-dawn.
Today the skies were clear, so when we pulled up anchor at 0620, there was enough light to see where we were going. That said, the anchor chain was very muddy, and we did need a flashlight in order to wash the chain. It was a glorious morning, with the sky taking on a rainbow of colors throughout the pre-dawn.
