Back on Shawnee after teak work

Atlantic Yacht Basin, Chesapeake, VA, 12 miles south of Norfolk

Friday, August 1, 2014

We are back on Shawnee, two months after a beautiful job by Atlantic Yacht Basin redoing the varnish work – 9 coats.  It just gleams.  Highly recommend this yacht yard.   They clean up, are extremely helpful, enterprising, and do superb work.

We rented a car one-way, stopping in Brooklyn to see grandkids. Drew saw new Celia Twombly, one month old.  We stopped in Long Island City, 4 miles away, to see daughter, Sarah and husband, Yeang as well.  We slept there for 4 hours and headed south.  We left at 2:30 am, a great time to see NO traffic in NYC.

We arrived at Chesapeake, VA and spent Friday grocery shopping, testing the rigging and engine to make sure that when they put the mast back up everything was connected and tuned correctly.   It was all set, we were ready to turn around in the basin. I turned the ignition key and nothing happened. No sound at all.  Drew noticed that the batteries weren’t charging properly when the engine turned on.  So within an hour the boatyard brought us a new battery. Drew replaced the 10 year-old battery, a couple of fuses and says he still hasn’t diagnosed the whole problem completely.  “There’s too much resistance.” for those of you who understand electronics.  We’re spending the night here.

 Mess in salon to fix the battery

 beautiful newly finished table

I sit and read or clean during these periods of big fixes.  At least I’m reading a good novel, The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd. The Internet is intermittent so I can’t send this blog yet or do email today.  It may be interference of heavy rain as well.  We are snug and dry inside Shawnee.

This trip we will motor up the ICW, past the Portsmouth Navy Yard to Norfolk and then directly out to sea at Cape Henry, the mouth of the Chesapeake.  Our plan is to beat the LO Bertha, a tropical storm in the Caribbean, and go straight to Cape Cod or Block Island.  There is little wind predicted so we’ll motor (ugh) most of the way. 

No Mazu this trip.  She is spending some time with the Patches, her vacation home and family she loves.

Drew has an important meeting as do I next week so we rented an Iridium phone to talk at sea, an interesting and expensive experiment.

Since it’s absolutely pouring I’ll go watch a DVD.