olverson's.

from price cove at st. george creek, we decided to cross the potomac from MD to VA and head to olverson's lodge creek marina on the yeocomico river.  the weather was not looking good for later in the day and we were running a little low on water and well, let's face it, i was starting to have withdrawal symptoms from not doing laundry!  for those who don't know, if  you are an MTOA member, you get one night free at olverson's and we decided to take advantage of that. olverson's is not high end but they call themselves the friendliest marina in the bay and they certainly are friendly and helpful. most of olverson's consists of covered slips and even if you have a slip without a roof, the walkway is still covered which was really kind of nice since it rained a lot while we were there.

there is a unique culture here in virginia with respect to the covered slips and it's not just at olverson's. people start decorating - you have the standard "it's 5 o'clock somewhere" and "margaritaville" signs and posters, strings and strings of little colored lights, flags, mobiles, plaques, and then some people really start going wild with stuffed deer heads, stuffed fish, giant clocks  and other weird things hanging from the ceiling, nailed to the posts, etc.   for these people, their boats in their covered slips ARE their vacation homes so they start adding furniture, basically extending the inside of their boats to out on the docks to better socialize with the neighbors.  you have the usual chairs and tables, some couches, and grills and smokers, but then the more creative ones start building - dock boxes to hold more stuff, bars and bar stools,  whole kitchen counters with cabinets and sinks and then they bring in the appliances - electric fans, TVs and full-size refrigerators!   those who had big boats in their slips that they eventually replaced with a smaller boat, will build over the slip to extend the dock so that they have more space to put stuff.  it's really quite incredible - you walk down the dock and feel like you're walking through someone's living room!  i think that for anyone who has never been, a visit to olverson's or D dock at norview marina in deltaville, if you are ever in the area, should be mandatory!  it's a unique experience.

we didn't expect to stay as long as we did at olverson's but since they had a courtesy car we could use, we decided to drive down to deltaville the next day, pick up some stuff at storage, three weeks worth of snail mail, including tom's new folding bicycle, a special order at west marine and then go grocery shopping.  all of that took pretty much the whole day.  we had a huge thunderstorm that night with lots of lightning and the next day was pretty wet and miserable, too, so we decided to stay one more day and ended up borrowing the car again and driving to colonial beach for lunch.  that was nice because the last time we were there, we were just passing through, only spent the night at the marina which is a couple of miles from town, then left the next day so we never got to see the place. while walking in downtown colonial beach, through a pottery shop window, i saw a woman carrying THREE beagle puppies so i had to go in.  the one little female was just absolutely adorable but i had to walk away.  consuelo, who was waiting in the car, would NOT have been amused.  the lady said she found the puppies by the side of the road in la plata, MD.  someone had just dumped them there.  she was looking for good homes for the puppies but, well, we weren't in the market for a new puppy.  i have done the geriatric to pediatric thing before and let me tell you, it is not for the faint of heart.  beagles are especially difficult because they require more entertainment than normal to keep them focused on you instead of following their noses.  even tom said he was tempted.  please....  one dog is enough!  it was hard to walk away though - she was just so soft and sweet. 

we also stopped at a couple of obscure marinas/boatyards.  this is something tom and i both enjoy doing - just walking through boatyards and poking around.  other people do antiques, yard sales, or whatever, but we do boatyards.  the one at coles point has a spectacular view of the potomac.  anyway, it was fun to play hooky from work.  we had originally planned to cruise to colonial beach but it really was too far away by boat for this trip and the land cruise in the rain did us just fine.  i also enjoyed the sight of "amber waves of grain" although not all the fields were quite amber yet.  just seeing those grasses undulating in the wind and the rain as we drove by, i thought it was beautiful.  since i grew up in the suburbs, farming has always been something pretty foreign to me.  i'm not very good with plants either - i manage to kill most of them - so it is probably best that i just look at other people's work. in any case, it was a fun day despite all the rain. 

not too many photos for this blog entry.  the rain just killed all the light.

memorial day weekend.

we left solomons and the drum point marine crew as soon as the broken circulating pump was replaced, which was about noon, and had an uneventful passage south to the mouth of the potomac river.  NOAA has been consistently wrong with their weather predictions so far.  it had called for quite a bit of wind but the chesapeake was pretty flat and we rode the current most of the way, making very good time.  upon rounding point lookout into the potomac river, it got a little choppy AND there were crabpots to dodge but for  the most part, the notorious mouth of the potomac behaved.  we dropped the anchor in one of smith creek's little coves and hustled to get consuelo off the boat and to the beach.  she'd been holding it long enough and all three of use were under some stress regarding that.  i actually already had her locked up in the cockpit just in case.  NOAA called for a NW wind for the next couple of days and that is how it started out but then the wind did a 180 and our USB modem, which had been working fine all this time... well, all of a sudden, NO internet!  grrrr...  and i was working, too.  and then we swung back to face NW and voila, back online!  the wind just kept swinging us around and the signal was on and off.  it got really annoying.  i managed to get my work done although it took longer than usual; however, at 1:30 in the morning, after finally shutting down, i stepped outside and was able to catch the predicted meteor shower and that was pretty neat to watch.  tom, unfortunately, was fast asleep, so he didn't get to see it;  however, he got up early the next morning and saw the sunrise, as well as two ospreys chasing two eagles.  i missed all of that - i was dead to the world at that hour.  we went out for a dinghy ride and saw a better place to anchor, closer to a beach for consuelo, so back we went to the boat and we moved anchorage.  well, and the same thing happened again!  when we were facing NW, we had internet.  if we swung around, we did not. it was very frustrating.  in retrospect, the next time this happens, i am going to try moving the cradlepoint router, which has the aircard attached to it, to a different location on the boat and see how that works out.

we also had another nasty surprise:  the cups on our anenometer were missing - it looks like the hailstorm from the other day had knocked them off!  oh well...  probably the reason why when we had that little bit of a blow come through at the new anchorage - it was so little that by the time we had time to get over our surprise, it had come and gone - tom checked our weather center at the time and the wind speed indicator said 6.7 knots.  huh??  later that afternoon, as we were approaching the boat on the dinghy, he happened to look up and noticed that all three cups were missing from the anenometer.  i guess it was just too much to ask to have escaped the hailstorm completely unscathed. 

all three cups missing from anemometer, knocked off by the hail

we explored all of smith and jutland creeks by dinghy and got more sun than we probably should have.  jutland creek reminded us very much of the corrotoman river.  and i got to see a little osprey harass a big bald eagle, too - incessantly - those ospreys are tough!  tom and i worked on boat projects - you know, those little  things you say you'll get to when you find a bit of free time?  well, we had free time so they got done and aside from the internet issue (again), the holiday weekend was very relaxing until a bunch of yahoos in little boats and jet skis showed up at consuelo's beach, made a lot of noise and started a bonfire.  they left a lot of beer cans AND they did not douse the fire at 10:00 p.m. when they finally went home.  sigh.... 

on monday, memorial day, we pulled up the anchor and ran over to st. george creek, also on the MD side of the potomac. up-creek, it is pretty built up so we didn't bother going any further than just past the harry lundeberg school of seamanship at piney point.  you can't miss it - the building is huge. we doubled back and checked out tarkill cove but the aircard went kaput there and we had had enough of THAT at smith creek.  we moved on to price cove which has a nice long beach and is probably a really popular spot but we figured we'd have it all to ourselves in the late afternoon and at night when all the day people were gone.  it's a pretty big cove so the tubers and jet ski folk usually move on and are annoying somewhere else rather than just circling around the same place all the time. it also got really hot in the early afternoon and tom and consuelo had to check their eyelids for leaks.  when it cooled off, we all went to the beach for a really long walk.

the one really good thing about consuelo's being banished from our bed is that i don't go nuts anymore about her getting dirty.  she went wading and rolled in the sand and i stayed calm.  she got hosed down on the swim platform and toweled dry and she was "clean enough."  we had dinner and watched a particularly spectacular sunset.  yup, holiday weekends are a pretty good thing! ok, i confess - i had to work but there wasn't much of it so it still felt pretty festive. 

spectacular sunset at price cove on st. george creek

my mama duck.

there are other stories that i want to tell besides the usual about where we went, what we saw, who we saw, tips for other cruisers, etc.  this story is about my mama duck - i want to tell it before i leave her behind for good and she forgets all about me.

it was after a winter storm early last year, 2013.  one of our neighbor boats at regatta point marina had a swim platform that was very low to the water and it was littered with debris, mostly pine needles.  i never paid much attention, passing it while walking up and down the dock, but one day, i noticed the duck.  she was easy to miss, a little brown thing blending right in there with the debris, just sitting there not moving and i wondered - is that a nest?  well, one day, when there was no duck sitting there, i took a closer look.  it just looked like a clump of pine needles and junk but there were indeed 12 eggs and she had covered them up with more pine needles!  cool, i thought - i can watch this development, it will be fun!  i did some reading up on mallards and i walked by several times a day to check on her.  i had some dog food left over from the swan (another story for another time) so i brought some over and tossed them on the swim platform and left.  when i came back later, the food was gone, so i started bringing some every day.  well, the crows found the nest one day while the little mama duck was gone and they got three of the eggs before some of my neighbors managed to chase them away.  we were all pretty upset about the broken eggs and i decided that i better not be tossing food all over the swim platform to attract the crows either.  instead, i put a pile of food behind the nest and camouflaged them with some pine cones.  the first time i did that while the duck was sitting on the nest, she got up in fright but she wouldn't leave.  i just kept talking to her in a soft voice and left as soon as i had put the food down so that she would know that i didn't mean any harm.  also, her nest was getting a bit thin so i brought over some more pine needles and the next time i looked, they had been rearranged and incorporated into the nest.  this went on for about a month - food and pine needles - she would watch me warily but she never got up anymore when i came over.  in the meantime, from 12 eggs, it became 9, then 7, then 5.  i really have no idea what happened to the other eggs - i checked at least once a day but that was about it.  two of the 5 eggs hatched into cute little fluffy ducklings but the next day, they were nowhere to be found and the little mama the duck stood by the nest for a little while looking lost and confused.  then i didn't see her any more after that.  i was heartbroken and depressed.  when i inspected the nest after she left, there was nothing there but pine needles - not even egg shells or any trace of anything remotely duck.  oh well...  it was sad and i didn't want to talk about the duck for a while.   but i did have photos at least, so for one brief moment....

link:      mama duck and eggs

a few months later, in the dead of summer, tom came home in the rain one day and told me that there was an injured duck on the walkway from the parking lot so i went out to look at it.  was it the same duck?  i think so.  she wasn't afraid of me.  or maybe she was just too weak.  this duck looked like it had been attacked by some animal.  she had puncture wounds on the top and the sides of her head and all the feathers had been stripped from her neck.  she was also wet, which is unusual for a duck.  she just looked sick and weak.  i didn't know what else to do so i brought her a handful of dog food and she ate that right up, so i went back to the boat and brought her another handful, and from that time on,  a couple of times a day, i'd come out and look for her and give her some food.  she was never in the same place but the funny thing is how every time i was out, she was somehow always around, not too far away.  i kept saying that i didn't want her to know where i lived but pretty soon, she had figured that out and would come over and chirp at the door.  the bad part was that a drake started accompanying her and before i knew it, i had TWO ducks to feed.  he was always scared of me and wouldn't come close though.  interestingly enough, neither of them were scared of consuelo at all.  in the meantime though, the wounds were healing and her feathers started growing out again and covered up the scar.  i transitioned the two to cracked corn instead of dog food but they didn't seem to understand the corn so i mixed in some dog food with it but the corn was so messy on the dock that i decided they had to have bowls.  that was funny because they didn't understand bowls either.  these were clear glass bowls so i didn't think it was going to be so complicated but apparently, it was, so back to dog food - i had to make a trail of dog food that led to the bowl and it took a little while before they finally figured out that you went over the top of the bowl instead of whacking your bill on the glass!  the drake was hogging the bowl so then it became two bowls, one for her and one for him.  and then it became three bowls, one for water to push the corn down.  it was getting out of control!  but after a while, they came less and less and one day, they didn't come at all.  i kind of missed them but we were cruising every weekend anyway. 

link:    injured mama duck

they showed up again in the late fall.  by this time, they had both gone wild, not coming too close but hanging around like they were remembering me from somewhere.  i knew it was my mama duck because of the bump on her head  - scar tissue.  the corn got thrown in the shallows instead of being served in bowls and they didn't come every day.  sometimes, the tide was just too high and i couldn't throw the corn far enough and it would sink too deep for them to dabble so i started walking up the dock to the shallows with the corn.  they eventually began to follow.   and so it went - corn in the shallows behind our boat at low tide and corn in the shallows by the fixed dock at high tide.  they didn't come regularly though. in february, we moved for a month to the port urbanna marina as regatta point was having a water issue.  when we got back, it  took two days before the ducks showed up again.  one stormy day in april, they were standing on the floating dock just behind the boat, waiting around.  when i came out, she went to the finger pier close to the door and chirped.  it was windy, it was raining, and they wanted to be fed?  the drake backed off as usual but my little brown duck had no fear.  so i dug out the glass bowls again.  who knows what goes through their little duck minds?  certainly not i!  i just feed them. 

link:   bowl feeding

this spring, my little brown duck was scarce.  i suspected that she was nesting.  she did come over late one night though when tom and i were just getting home from dinner out with friends.   she followed me home so i came out with some corn for her but it was high tide so i had to walk back up the dock to toss it in the shallows.  that was the last time i saw her before we started cruising again.  interestingly enough, the drake, who had always been wary of us came over ALONE three times for bowl feeding.  he had never come without her before.  i had hoped to see her one more time before we went off cruising.  now i'll never know if she had a family or not.

hailstorm.

so far, we have been having a very pleasant stay at drum point marine despite the fact that we are here because we are broken.  there is a west marine within walking distance so tom has managed to get some projects done.  no excuses since supplies are readily available.  gary, drum point marine's owner, is himself working on replacing our circulating pump at the current time.

yesterday evening at about 1700h, we had some weather come through.  tom had been watching the radar because we wanted to run over to west marine to get some non-skid tape and didn't want to get caught out in the rain.  i asked about closing up the cockpit enclosure and he said that we had time.  i no longer listen to him about not bothering to close the overhead hatches when we leave - i ALWAYS close those. it doesn't matter if there is NO chance of rain, they will be shut no matter what.  living in deltaville all these years, we have gotten used to seeing weather cells on the radar approaching and then splitting up and leaving a clear window right over us - i don't know why this happens but it often did.  the northern neck of VA would get slammed and those of us on the south side of the rappahannock river would be just fine (except, of course, for the tornado in 2011 - EVERYONE felt that one!).  in any case, this is not what happened.  we did make it back from west marine in plenty of time before the wind and rain arrived and then we got blasted with hailstones as big as marbles!  this went on for a while and i have to say, it was really quite alarming.  i've seen hail before - pea-sized and lasting for a few seconds - but nothing at all like this! the racket was horrible.  the water was boiling. the whole thing was nerve wracking.  after what seemed like a really, really LONG time, it stopped and all was quiet. the wind died for about a minute and then it started up again, this time going the opposite direction and then came the torrential rain.  it didn't last long and when it was over, the sun came out and it was like nothing had happened - except for the fog over the creek created by the ice falling into the water and mud and run-off cascading from the land into the creek from the rain.  we stepped outside to check up on things and  aside from being seriously plastered with leaves, the boat was fine.  in the meantime, gary and crew were out fishing at the mouth of the patuxent river and i was a bit worried about them. they came in a couple of hours later and they were fine, too.  it was really something.  scary even when you think about it with that wind changing direction like that, like there was some kind of circular vortex going on.  i'm glad that we were tied up at the dock instead of anchored for this one.

tom took a video while all of this was happening and here is the link to it: 

hailstorm

i took a not-very-good photo through the window:  

hailstones! 

so much for planning.

we stayed in oxford for a week.  or rather, consuelo and i stayed in oxford for a week while tom was gone to martha's vineyard over the weekend. it was very relaxing and campbell's town creek marina is a really neat place.  it's small but very comfortable. when we left, the plan was to cross the bay heading south and then make a decision about where EXACTLY we were going to spend the night depending on how things went. it was really a nice day, great weather, and both the choptank river and the chesapeake were pretty flat.  that always works for me.  i don't enjoy the banging and the crashing, listening to my dishes rattling in the cabinets, watching consuelo be terrorized, etc. etc.  we decided that instead of staying a night in solomons and picking up the anchor and moving again the next day, we would just head straight to smith creek on the potomac river and then sit at anchor for a couple of days.  about six miles south of the patuxent river, i asked tom a question, the answer to which was to be found in the engine room.  lucky thing because when he opened the hatch, he discovered a lot of blue coolant fluid in the oil pan under the engine.  now, tom is mr. safety himself.  he had crawled all over the engine room checking on this, that and the other before we left oxford, and if there had been a leak then, he would certainly have noticed it.  the leak must have just happened so it's a lucky thing that he had an excuse to go down there.  anyway, he filled up the coolant overflow container and started checking around.  he found the leak and his provisional diagnosis was that it was the circulating pump.  anyway, we called drum point marine in solomons.  these are the people who repaired tadhana's engine after we got hit by lightning in 2012.  their top technician is a girl named katie.  ok, i am going to digress a bit here.  diesel mechanic is kind of an unusual profession for a female but my theory is that because she is a woman in a man's world, she simply has to be better than any of them.  that's how it usually works.  katie and i got along great and tom was very impressed with her.  i think someone asked us back then if we had a problem with a woman working on our engine.  WHY would we have a problem??  the bottom line is that the work gets done properly, no?  the added advantage was that katie was NOT messy - you know how some mechanics leave greasy fingerprints everywhere?  they are usually men :)  as it turns out, katie's pretty well known in her profession and not just because she's the only rose among the greasy thorns.  in any case, i just happened to have katie's personal cell phone number.  it's who you know, you know.  tom spoke to her a while and then we turned around and headed back north to solomons.  for some strange reason, now when i look at the hairpin curve track on the chartplotter on my computer, i just find it amusing.  tom had the kitchen timer set for every 10 minutes to remind him to open up the hatch and look at the overflow container to see how much coolant we were losing and how quickly.  when we ran out of coolant, he just ran fresh water through the system.  we went slowly and limped in to solomons. katie and gary, drum point marine's owner, both met us at their service dock.  they couldn't have been nicer or more helpful. katie confirmed tom's diagnosis and so it was just a matter of available replacement parts.  and so, here we sit in a boatyard again - at  least this time we don't have to be hauled out.  after we got settled in, i went back to work and when i looked up from my computer, i thought my  view was very pretty.  drum point marine's yard is at the head of back creek.  if you don't look at the boatyard itself, which, i'm sorry to say, is a disaster - it looks like a junk yard - the cove that it is in is very nice to look at.  tom suggested that i take a photo of "the view from my desk" at every place we stop.  he said i'd have quite a collection and i thought that was a really neat idea so i'm starting this collection with back creek as my first photo.

the circulating pump will not be installed until friday, two days from now, as they are waiting for the part and tomorrow afternoon, drum point marine's employees are scheduled for a fishing expedition.  that is fine.  if one is going to be stuck for a while, solomons island is far from a bad place to be stuck.  both tom and i are getting work done.  we have electricity.  we have water. we have wifi and it is easy to get consuelo off and on the boat.  grocery store, west marine, post office and restaurants nearby and as long as i'm facing my computer, i've got a terrific view with lots of action  - ospreys, great blue herons, mallards...  and the bickering barn swallows seem to like to hang out on tadhana's railing, too, so i get a close-up of them every time i look up.

as an addendum, i would like to reiterate the cruiser's definition of cruising:  "cruising is doing boat repair in exotic locations."  we got our baptism of fire early on in the course and it wasn't even that fiery either.  let's hope it stays that way! 

planning.

one thing about cruising is that you can't always make a plan and then stick to it.  you have a general idea of where you want to go and when you want to be there but there is a good chance that the plan will change. in fact, you MUST expect that the plan WILL change.  that's sort of how it is and you have to be flexible.

we had to leave tangier island because i have to work and i can't do that without internet so it was off to crisfield.  then we had to stay in crisfield one more day for favorable weather and after that, we crossed the Bay to solomons island where we spent one night and then crossed the Bay again to the choptank river.  we spent one night in la trappe creek across from cambridge (lots of good memories in that place - it used to be one of our favorite spots from when tom and i both lived in annapolis.) actually, the original plan had been to go straight to oxford, spend one night on the hook and then take a slip at campbell's town creek marina, but while i was busy working and not paying attention, tom decided to surprise me and change the plan.  when i looked up from work and checked the chartplotter, i noticed that we weren't taking a direct route to the tred avon river and quickly figured out where we were going.  it was a nice surprise.  it was a perfect evening, too, until consuelo decided to pee on the bed at about midnight!  she slept in the cockpit that night - i was so upset with her.  the next day, we left for oxford, where tom's brother lives, with the plan for TADHANA to sit at the marina for a week so that tom and henry could drive up to martha's vineyard over the weekend for their father's memorial service.  the timing of our arrival was perfect because we had some weather come in again and we were in a good place to sit it out, not to mention doing some major laundry and buying a new mattress pad.  oh well, obviously, it is not only the route planning that changes. 

i'm not exactly sure where we will be next week but the general plan is to be at the southern potomac the last week of this month.  you know, whatever...  the main constrictions are an internet connection, whether it be via wifi or a strong signal for our USB modem, and close to a place where consuelo can stretch her legs and do her thing.

speaking of consuelo, as i had mentioned prior, she has been having some little old lady issues, i.e. "accidents," so that is an adjustment as well for us.  but the fact of the matter is that she is a part of our family unit and we do our best to work around her little problem and find solutions.  in any case, she has been banned from our bed forever - i simply can't trust her little incontinent bladder.  poor consuelo has to make adjustments, too, and so far, the past two nights, she has been unable to figure out a way to get back on the bed at night, try as she might. it is hard to watch sometimes but life is all about change. she will be fine.

the other thing is that we found out that milton had been choppered out again to the mainland for a pacemaker site infection. the last we heard was that he had to have surgery for the pacemaker removal and a replacement at a different site.  we will be back in tangier island in a few weeks to check up on him, as well as to participate in the island's clean-up-the-bay day. 

in any case, oxford is a lovely town and while tom is away, i have a friend coming over from cambridge to visit. the boat is clean and sort of organized (i am thinking about throwing a blanket over tom's desk area to hide it haha). today is my day off from work - it is quiet and relaxing and i am just enjoying the day and good weather.  i was looking over the tentative schedule that tom had written out and i can see that, ambitious as it is, it will all go very quickly and we will wonder where the time went.  hey, i really like this cruising thing!  :) 

take two.

05/09/2014.  ok, NOW i am ready, i think.  we left a little after 8:00 a.m., headed for tangier island in heavy fog.  we were very much looking forward to seeing our old friend, milton parks, who owns and runs parks marina on the island.  much has been written about milton in various chesapeake publications and anyone who has ever been to tangier and has had the good fortune to encounter him WILL remember him forever so i'll just leave it at that.  i first met him in 2005 when consuelo and i went to tangier island on our own "i am woman" adventure on my former boat, the rosborough.  tom wasn’t even a blip in our radar yet then but the next year, in 2006, consuelo and i returned, bringing tom with us, and since then, except for 2007 and 2008 when we were based first in SC and then NC, the three of us have gone back to visit at least once every single year.  it has gotten to where milton considers one of his bulkhead slips OUR slip and kicks people off it when he knows we are coming.  he will be turning 83 this july and just got out of the hospital a few weeks ago – he has a lot of fans and he had us all very worried.  he isn’t just our friend.  we LOVE tangier island but quite honestly, we love milton more.  both are one of a kind. 

tangier island's shoreline is slowly being eaten away by mother nature.  the waterman's way of life is becoming a thing of the past.  and, well, milton is going on 83.  visiting tangier as often as we can has become even more important.  

i found this photo of milton on facebook.  i'd give credit to whoever took it if i knew who it was.  when i showed it to him, he laughed and said, "i think i was a lot younger when that was taken!"  no, i think he is timeless, but then again, i am one of his adoring, rabid fans   :) 

sur-reality

it is going to take a while to let it all sink in – that we are actually FREE to go where we want, WHEN we want.  the first cruise of the season was to reedville as tom had some stuff to do over there.  it was kind of anti-climactic  because i was just so tired and burnt out from two weeks on the hard, then cleaning, plus my job, and on top of that, working on my days off because there was so much work and they needed backup!  at the same time, we had put off celebrating tom’s retirement because we were still at the boatyard, painting, and i was kind of feeling guilty that we hadn’t done ANYTHING special at all for it.   the timing was incredibly bad.  this cruise was supposed to be a celebration of spring and tom’s retirement and our freedom and all i could think about was how unprepared i was for any kind of extended cruising!  the fact is that i was trying to squeeze a normal (for me) work day into all of that celebration, tired to begin with, and then to not have a reliable internet signal which is essential to my work,  i was extremely stressed out and it put a damper on everything.  i put up with two days of iffy internet before i lost it and it took me a while to recover from that even after we had picked up and and moved to little bay.  stress does not simply go away even when whatever was broken is fixed.  and with the beginning of the cruising season, after sitting for a few months, one really needs to ease into it gradually.  i can’t say how many times we said, oops we forgot this or we forgot that  - things that one didn’t even think about at the end of the season because they had become automatic.  basically, the main problem was that tom wanted to go go go and me, i wanted to start with a clean and organized boat before we finally got going.  tom’s and my threshold for “clean and organized boat” are at two distinct levels and after two weeks of the “limited ability to wash” scenario, i wasn’t thrilled about being separated so soon from the tap.  however, it was really the iffy internet on a working monday and then tuesday that did me in, i.e. YOU may be on vacation but i am NOT.  in retrospect, maybe i should have taken the time off, which i really can’t afford.  better yet, we should have waited to leave on a friday rather than sunday (i work on Sundays).  in any case, after a night at lovely little bay, one of our favorite anchorages, we decided to go back to our slip in deltaville, do what needed to be done, re-provision and start all over again on friday and head to tangier island to see milton parks who just had a pacemaker placement and scared the heck out of all of us.  so much for wherever we want, whenever we want.  we will get it eventually. we are (i am) allowed to be ungraceful in the beginning.  

LINKS:  

back to little bay 

sunrise at little bay

the reality, part two

for the uninitiated, cruising and living aboard is NOT like camping -  tadhana has all the comforts of home!  however, this all changes when the boat is hauled out and blocked in a boatyard's gravel parking lot.  there is dust - lots of it - and because it is spring, there is pollen and it is EVERYWHERE.  you simply cannot keep anything clean plus your ability to wash is limited when the boat is on the hard.  this is when living aboard becomes very much like camping and if camping isn't really your thing, then you are in for a mostly unpleasant experience.  not to mention the fact that the boat feels dead - the movement that you have been used to is gone.  it is really only tolerable for a few days.  on the first day out, not surprisingly, one is mostly discombobulated.  your boat has become a treehouse and getting on and off is a production made all the more complicated by the presence of a dog who needs to do her business outside and cannot get up and down the ladder by herself.  consuelo ABSOLUTELY detests being carried and for the first few days, we were having some real problems with her cooperation until i figured out to turn the ladder around so that when she was carried, she would be facing the swim platform on the way up. dogs, apparently, also have control issues!  who knew?  everything is disorganized, stuff is misplaced and everything gets dirty no matter how hard you try to keep it under control.  you can't really cook because you can't really wash.  we ate a lot of fried chicken and take-out chinese and used paper plates.  quite frankly, the best solution is not to live on the boat AT ALL while it is being worked on, however, that option is reserved for people who have the $ to spend on such luxuries.  as it was, we were already doing our own work to save money.  in any case....

it took 12 days from haul to launch - glass bead blasting to bring tadhana's bottom to bare fiberglass,  four coats of epoxy and three coats of bottom paint.  in the meantime, the weather did not cooperate.  we got rain and wind, mud and pollen.  everything was dirty - the boat, consuelo, and us.  painting got done in between thunderstorms. we were constantly tired and sore and out of sorts. in the middle of all of that, my work computer died and i had to do an emergency purchase.  the new machine was delivered quickly but no one was around to sign for it so that got delayed and then there was the matter of setting it up, configuring and customizing.  i hardly needed that inconvenience on top of everything else.  let me just say that the whole experience was miserable, and though i understand that it's all a matter of perspective, i.e. we weren't sick, hungry, homeless or dead, it was, nevertheless, a relief to get back in the water with our now bullet-proof bottom that will, hopefully, not need too much in the way of maintenance for a while.  oh, but wait!  once we got back to our slip at regatta point, there was the big cleanup yet to do!  at the end of the day, trust me, ibuprofen helps.  

the following are links to photos of the bottom work done that i posted on facebook. 

the haulout

tadhana in a skirt

bare bottom

first coat of epoxy

and it is done!