A Friday of Mixed Weather

The day dawned bright and sunny, shading to rain and then mist in the afternoon. Today's rounds included the NAPA parts store for a special vice-grip to deal with the propeller shaft, a run to the boat parts store for pieces parts to attach the fancy radar reflector, and our nearly daily run to the library to update the blog.

The boat has some of her fittings reset: the bow and stern pulpits, the portlights (windows) which are rectangles with rounded corners on this boat. The hand rails (wooden rails for hanging on to both topside and below decks) will have to wait until Tuesday. I am not sure what else is done, having not been aboard to see.

We are making good use of the library card, both with the computer access and checking out materials. We spend at least 2-3 hours every day walking, some days a bit more. The local cab company charges $5 for a ride in town, so when we have more groceries or boat parts than our two hands can carry, we call the cab. Not too bad for a couple of suburban rats trying to make it work without a car. Besides being too cheap to spend the money if we don't have to, the exercise is good for us. We also get to know a lot of people just by running into them on the street.

We talked to the boatyard folks. They tell us it will speed their job up if we can get everything possible out of the way, so our plans for this weekend are to remove all of the equipment and stores from the boat, go through and repack to go back aboard when the work is done, and just generally stay out of trouble.

If the weather is fair, we thought we would don our life jackets and take the dinghy for a spin around the cove. We nearly frightened the wits out of the boatyard crew with our antics the first year we had the dinghy, and we thought we ought to get some practice before we need to use it in Bermuda.

I think there is supposed to be a parade, probably on Monday. If we have not found anything else to do, we will watch that. We know several of the people with boats in the water, so I expect we will spend some time talking to them about how their work is going. I may even catch up on my correspondence. It would help if I had remembered all of my address book.