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!
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