2014-15 SAILING AWAY AGAIN

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Trying Verizon’s MIFI tonight to see if the blog will fly out to you all. It connects my computer to WIFI from our mooring.  Please put your email address in the upper right hand corner if you want to get these posts when I write them (not daily).  Also love to read comments you can write below.

   First night back on board, readying Shawnee to sail south.   

   My sister, Chris, and her husband, Bill, who live in Sharon generously donated time to drive us to the boat otherwise we’d have to take an expensive cab ride.  During the week Drew and I drove down to Marblehead from Exeter several times to load up. Since the MYC launch doesn’t run Mondays and Tuesdays at the end of the season we used our dinghy, Tweety, back and forth. 

   The four of us stopped in Salem (Drew with a witch city ghoul) 

to view the Alexander Calder exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum – a great show with his well known mobiles and stabiles.  We had a delicious lunch in the garden café on a spectacular sunny classic New England fall day.  Chris and Bill then dropped Drew and me off with all our food at the Marblehead Yacht Club.

   To keep up with the repairs we did have the genoa repaired last week after splinters were found in a ripped seam – an untold accidental error when workers took off the sails and laid them on the dock to do the bright work this summer (varnish the teak).  The teak does look beautiful.

   The bilge pump isn’t working properly and Drew will find out why. (It’s under the floor of the salon where water can collect.) . Usually, automatically, the bilge pump sucks the water out. It’s a pretty important feature to prevent the boat from filling with water.  All boats include a hand pump to empty the bilge from the cockpit in an emergency.

 Mazu is on board getting ready to sail.   

She just passed her Pet Partner test last week that keeps up her certification as a therapy dog – allows us to take her everywhere and gives her a liability insurance policy. Looking a bit pensive here.

  We are having our dueling weather apps discussion tonight, reading information from about a half dozen sources to see what the wind and weather forecasts are for the next 4 days so we can arrive safely in Hampton, VA.  There is usually a debate between us about when is the best time to leave, what time is slack tide at the Cape Cod Canal, when is the ideal and safest time to go through, must figure in time to fuel up in Pocasset, MA, etc.

  I prepare sandwiches ahead and leave a list of food we can grab as we sail off-shore for 3 days straight taking turns at watch (Zone bars for Drew, cheese sticks, nuts, fruit cups, yogurt cups, apples, bananas, cold tea, cold-cuts, cereal, water, peanut butter crackers for Deb.  With the rocking and rolling I only “cook” scrambled eggs and Stouffers frozen meals on the gimbled stove/oven at sea. 

   It can get boring at night unless a tanker gets in our path or comes zooming up behind and scares the #*&#! out of us. Audible books app reads aloud to me through my night watches, Zero to One presently.  I am at the helm 10 to 2 AM with my headphones on, eyes open.  Of course we are on auto-pilot, a preprogrammed route the boat follows through a navigation system with way-points. 

  Beautiful moon tonight.  More later.