We had a really great long weekend, Monday being Labor Day Holiday. Spent Saturday working on-board - you saw Philip's entry regarding all the hard work he and our friend, Eric did on the mast. Great job, guys! What you haven't heard yet is about Luke's fishing skills coming to the fore. Well, there were a bunch of guys fishing off of B-Dock (we are docked at A-Dock) and Luke was just dying to go over and see if they had caught anything, so I took him for a walk over there. We get there and start chatting to them and they show us their catch, about 8 blue snappers in a bucket. The one lady offers Luke to hold her pole and, blow me down if he doesn't catch a beautiful striped bass within the first 5 minutes. It was bigger than all their blue snappers but still not big enough to keep, so the men showed Luke the scales and how to hold it by it's mouth and then he threw it back in again. So Luke can't wait to get off-shore because he is hunting for the bass' grandpa, he says that will be big enough for us to keep and cook for dinner.
Sunday night we slept on-board for the first time since last year. It was so wonderful to be there again, feeling the slow movement of the boat under us. It still feels a little like camping because we haven't got the propane tanks filled yet, the water tanks aren't filled yet, some of our boat stuff is still at home and, most importantly, our new toilet hasn't arrived so we have no head at all right now. Yes, so you guessed it, every time anyone needs to go, we have to drop what we're doing, clamber out the boat and down the dock, through the gate, across the parking lot, down the road, use our access key to open the gate and into the communal ablution block that the marina and the Camping/RV Park share. Well, that gets old pretty fast. So I am looking forward to the day when we have everything we need self-contained on-board.
Monday, being the public holiday, we invited South African friends of ours and their two young children to spend the afternoon on the boat. We also had along for the fun Zimbabwean, Eric living with us, his friend Jesse from North Carolina (who is about to be relocated again to Chicago) and their two friends, Ashley and Erin from NYC who came on an engine trial run last weekend. I think that was the record of how many people we have managed to squeeze on our not too large sail boat. The wind was rather gusty but we had a constant 20 knot prediction from the Weather Channel, so we decided that with the very little kids we had on board and us being docked in a very tight slip in our marina we would not chance going out into the harbour, as originally planned, but just hung out on the boat, chatting, eating and generally having a good time. We enjoyed having all the friends there, spending time chatting about the ultimate dream of the big schooner.