This morning, while enjoying my coffee in the hammock that is under the shade tarp in the front of the boat, I kept hearing what sounded like a horse snorting. That just did make any sense to me since we really are not very close to the shore. Nevertheless, for about 15 minutes I kept hearing snort, snort, and snort.

I finally got up and walked to the side of the boat and looked about the mooring field, toward the source of the snorting. What I saw surprised me! Just about a couple of hundred feet away was a man swimming and a bridle in his hand. Attached to the bridle was just the upper part of the head of a horse, with its nose out of the water, snorting away as it struggled to breath.

The horse was struggling a bit, that was why it was snorting so much. I felt bad for the horse since it was so far from shore. If it ran into any more trouble, it would be too far away to make it to shore safely. The man was obviously exercising the horse and I can only hope that he knew what he was doing. After another 5 minutes, I returned to my hammock as the horse and its master swum out of sight.

Late this morning I took Mary Margaret’s very old Toshiba laptop and my not quite as old Del laptop to shore. These two units are our backup computers, just in case our main laptop dies. Both of the old units still work but neither one is charging up the battery. I think there is a bad connection between the battery charging brick and the computers’ respective batteries.

Mary Margaret’s Toshiba was old when we starting cruising almost 9 years ago. It must be close to 13 to 15 years old. It runs on the old Windows XP operating system. My old Del is about is 7 years old and runs on the old Windows 7 operating system. Both units have survived the rigors of salt air and pounding to windward remarkably well.

Once on shore I walked about a mile to a computer repair shop and left them there in hopes that they can be repaired. I will have a better idea of their prognosis tomorrow afternoon when I should get a call from the tech with his thoughts. Keep your fingers crossed for us…