First a question for the techies out there – is anyone familiar with how PayPal works. One of the options that I have to receive revenues from the book sales is PayPal, the other is to receive a quarterly cheque if the revenues exceed $20. The PayPal will cough up if the revenues exceed $5 plus they will do it every month which is what I am really looking at. All they ask on the Lulu site is for a PayPal e-mail address. Is that something other than your normal e-mail? Is it something specific that PayPal assigns?

Now on with the real part of the blog. This is the sort of day that Barb and I look forward to in cruising. The guys were supposed to be on the boat today doing the engine install, but circumstances came up that prevented it. We had planned a trip to Yorktown to get ourselves and the dog out of the boat and decided to carry on with our part of the plan regardless, and I am really glad that we did. Yorktown, as you history buffs may know is the site of one of the last definitive battles in the American War of Independence. General Cornwallis (nephew to the Edward Cornwallis who helped to found Halifax) commanded for the British and Washington and Rochambeau commanded the Americans and French respectively. We had a great tour guide who truly understood the operational and siege warfare art and communicated it very well. I am continually struck by how much of the War of Independence was decided here in Virginia and moreover how much the USA is indebted to the French for their victory. Indeed the battle of Yorktown although brilliantly planned and executed on land it would have been for naught if the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse hadn’t prevailed over the British Admiral Graves who was a bit of a wuss and gave up too soon. This whole point in history is a complex pattern of feint and deception with Washington convincing the British senior commander, Gen Clinton, that the attack was going to be on New York; close cooperation with their French allies and a fast march south to Yorktown where Cornwallis was trying to build a British strategic port on the Chesapeake; a naval engagement that ended Cornwallis’s hope of reinforcement from the sea and a classically executed example of siege warfare culminating with one of the largest surrenders of British forces in history. All in that one spot. The fortifications have been preserved as much as possible and as I said, our tour guide was excellent in her explanations. And we only saw a small part of it. A visit is strongly recommended to anyone passing through here. You can check them out at www.yorkcounty.gov/tourism

After getting back to the boat we did get going on some of the boat tasks that we have on the list, starting with re-installing the Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) unit that we have. This unit crapped out on us halfway through the cruise last winter and we have had it serviced under warrantee. It is now re-installed but I still don’t know if it works OK or not since the water here is so shallow and muddy it thinks there is no depth. At least I hope that’s what the problem is. As for the other binnacle instrument job, I have to confess to something. Although we have only been off the boat for 11 months I had completely forgotten which switches I need to flick to get which instruments to work. The fact that I have the autohelm and wind instruments on the same circuit since they are both Raymarine, the radar and chartplotter on the same circuit since they are talking to each other and the two depth sounders on their own circuit just because they were 12 volt units, didn’t help my memory too much. Pardon me while I bang my head against the wall a little bit.

I am also putting together a PowerPoint presentation for the short blurb that I am going to be giving Saturday afternoon. I also had another grey moment here as I have known for weeks that we were going to be participating in this seminar and then I went and invited some friends of ours down from Richmond to visit on the same day. What a blockhead – me, not them. Sorry Cliff. Sorry Dianne. We’ll make it on the first weekend in April. we’d like to meet your two new hounds anyway and that’ll give us the chance.