De-Commissioning

Well, we've had our last sail of the season. There've been successes and failures. On the plus side, we finally have a reliable fuel system and can count on the engine. We also have the GPS talking to the radar. In addition, we have completed our three year project of replacing the sails.

On the negative side, we didn't get to sail nearly as much as we wanted. Some of this was our own issues, some of this was the weather being uncooperative at varieous times and some of this was due to things taking longer to get done by the boatyard. The first area is one of our own procrastination. The second is the luck of the draw. The third area is that our boatyard is undergoing a period of adjustment following the death of Horatio Knight, who founded and ran the yard for forty years. His son and daughter are doing all they can to carry on, but the loss of forty years of hands-on experience is a tough job. We're trying to give them the time they need to make the transition, but in the meantime, there have been substantial delays as they struggle to pick up the slack.

In any case, today (Wednesday), we had our last sail and tied Fiddler up on the dock, washed her down from bow to stern and took her sails off her to be taken away for washing and stored by Doug Pope, the man who makes our sails.

Kathy and Star have gone through the galley and decided on the meals we can make with the food we have left. We'll be having four dinners aboard and two meals out. When we leave the boat, there will be nothing edible on board, unless you count a bottle of black pepper. We don't want to leave anything a mouse could live on.

We need to pack up and ship home anything we don't want to take with us on the train, give the inside a general cleaning, and load our pre-sailing/post sailing things on board before we leave.

Tomorrow (Thursday), the yard crew will take Fiddler out of the water and place her on stands for final clean-up and winterization.

This is always a hard time for us. We hate to leave Fiddler in the hands of strangers, but we can't stay any longer. Besides, we're homesick and miss our home and our friends. It's time to head west.

At some time soon, Kathy has promised to add a synopsis of our cruise on the American Eagle. It was good to see them again and I don't think Star was quite what they expected in a seventy year old lady. We'll try to get photos of the haul-out and put them in an entry tomorrow.

Meantime, it's late and we have a lot to do before we can come home.