Our summer season started off very cold and windy. We got home in good time and just before the poorer weather started at the beginning of May. By the time Memorial Day weekend came around things had gotten better. We went to Hamburg Cove with the squadron and found very few moorings were in for transients like us to 'borrow'. We got there early so we got one and shared with Afternoon Delight. Heather and Mike did not join us this year due to a wedding they had to attend.
We then started our usual round of medical appointments as well as getting Perfectly Normal ready for summer sitting and hoping to be sold time. New this season was building or rebuilding two dinghies. Our RIB had seen better days. We bought it 2003 and the fabric was so thin you could see the air inside the inflatable tubes. W-e-l-l, almost. It needed constant patching so I decided to rip the tubes off and rebuild it out of wood. Yes, turning a inflatable dinghy into a hard dinghy. But first... I had to finish a dinghy kit we had in storage (and before that our garage) for more than 15 years. Had to have a dinghy to use while I was building the old dinghy. The kit took less than two weeks but the inflatable-to-wood project took more than a month. And about $300 of materials. And a little blood.
I was reasonably happy with the results of the project but with everything else that was going on I was very busy. Writing work had to get done. Pearson work and two dinghies to be built all kept me extremely busy. Where did I ever squeeze in the time to have a full-time job?
Things mostly quieted down by the 4th of July. We has a great sail over to Montauk for a holiday rendezvous but lost our port-side propeller assembly en route when we had a lull in the wind and started the engines. At times we were travelling at more than 8 knots over the ground with several knots of current against us. For non-sailors, that is fast. Very fast.
We had a week long cruise with Heather later in July that weather messed up a bit but still wasn't bad. Spent more time in Block than we planned or had done in many, many years.
In August we had the boat hauled to do our annual maintenance. We usually do this in Pasadena, MD after we've started south but decided to try a local (Essex, CT) business this year. It was a bit cheaper and we could do most of the work ourselves. We got our new propellers installed just before our two week window was up so it all worked out right. Except for the expense.
About this time a dinghy I was looking at at Defenders was reduced in price by $300. I looked at it at $900 before deciding to take on the dinghy rebuild project but now at $600 (after spending $300 on the project), it was too much of a bargain to pass up. It's a cheap PVC Zodiac that will probably not last very long with year round use but at $600 for a 11 1/2 foot dinghy we could not pass it up. We'll still use the wood dinghy when we are in Conn. and take inflatable south with us.
Just before we headed south we had a baby shower for Heather. She is due around Thanksgiving and we'll be trying to arrange our cruising destination with having to fly back for birth time. All this is complicated by the devastation in Marathon for Hurricane Irma. We're not sure we'll be able to get there.
As I said, as I write this we are in Annapolis but my report on our passage here will be in my
next blog entry.
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