A Day in the Boatyard

Days on Cruise:  53

We enjoyed our first night living on the hard. Jim and Mimi from Canada, also on the hard in their boat nearby, proposed we share dinner in the screened porch barbecue area. The four of us are the only people living on our boats here, so it’s pretty quiet after 6:00.  Cathryn put together appetizers  and contributed spinach for the salad and edamame for a side dish. Mimi made  marinated, barbecued chicken wings, and tossed together the salad ingredients. It was BYOB of course. We each brought our own plates and flatware, lit the candles, and spent 3 hours cooking, telling stories and sharing a fabulous meal. What a great evening!

Max, Dan, Matt, John, Ashley, Amanda, Cheryl, Ed, Ken: we know most of the folks who work at the Delatville Boatyard now. They’re all friendly, competent professionals, each of whom spent a part of their workday with us. We got all new zincs, the new cutlass bearing was installed, and the sea strainers were cleaned. Bob worked on cleaning and polishing the exterior of our boat; Cathryn finished scraping off the small barnacles on the bottom that weren’t removed by pressure-washing and took care of some of our personal business.  And finally at 3:30 John loaded us back up on the Travel Lift and splashed us back into the water. Max went into the engine room to adjust the shaft logs, and off we went -- a whole 500 feet to spend tonight on their fuel dock!

We had picked several alternative anchorages for tonight depending on what time we got away from the boatyard, but by 3:30 the wind had come up too high and it was too late in the day to make it to even the closest anchorage.  Oh well, we’re happy we made the stop and got some things taken care of, and tomorrow we’ll have a whole day to move onto more interesting activities.