05/09/2012, Shelburne NS
We have changed our minds about going to the boat this week. We need the MoHo to stay in and it won't be until this weekend that we can get the new propane tank certified and filled and with this weather it appears that it would be raining all the time anyway. Depending upon when the MoHo is ready, we might head off for the weekend and the first couple of days next week. Barb has to be back for her physio on Tuesday but I rather think that would be all that we need. He weekend looks like good weather and Monday too. Keep your fingers crossed for us. Late breaking news! Looks like the truly viable option is this weekend and Monday, Tuesday, as after that it will rain again. Plus, if we don't get 'er launched by the 15th we will start to pay additional storage fees which I would like to avoid.
The docks are all in at the club in Shelburne and we got a rather pleasant surprise. Apparently the wait list for a dock wasn't as long as we expected, what with folks electing to keep their boats near to their homes or selling it or moving away, so now we have a spot on a dock at an extremely reasonable price. This is especially great with Barb's new knee as it will make things a whole lot easier for her to get on and off and do the necessaries to get Nelleke ready for immediate short term cruising.
Speaking of cruising, a couple of years ago our friend Bob from Ombre Rose pointed us at Active Captain but I'm afraid that, other than creating a profile and registering for their regular e-mails, we haven't really made much use of it. Now, being dirt bound, I have revisited the site and what a neat tool! I guess in the intervening years a number of other folk far more forward leaning that I was have been madly adding their posts to the site and there are a whole bunch of anchorages listed and comments added. This is sort of an on line Skipper Bob only more so. I have been doing my belated bit by adding some sites up here in Nova Scotia and will be adding more once we start exploring again, but in the meanwhile it is loads of fun following our routes and seeing what others thought about the spots that we had poked into. Apparently they send you free goodies after you have made certain levels of contributions to their site so I am looking forward to that too.
Once again allow me to toot the Shelburne trumpet. It has the third best natural harbour in the world, although I'm not totally sure how anyone comes up with that, and we are open for business. We would welcome any and all cruising yachts to come here to visit. It's a great and comfortable place to clear customs when you are entering Canada from the US or the Caribbean and the and yacht club is not only welcoming but it also is in reasonable walking distance from most of the things that you would need: Napa Auto Supply, d'Eon Fishing Supply, Drug Store, Grocery Store and Liquor Store to name just a few, plus there are a couple of really excellent restaurants quite close by and as well a couple of pubs besides the one in the club itself. If you are theatrically inclined there is the Osprey Arts Centre just to the back of the yacht club as well.
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05/07/2012, Shelburne NS
Oh it's a fun filled weekend indeed.
Early Saturday morning we were off for a Pot Party. No, not the brain addled kind. Rather the ones where you take multiple plants, split them up and pop them into pots. The Garden Club, which seems to be spearheaded by the Millers, a nice couple originally from Ontario but who now live here, breeding lilies, each year, has a fund raiser whereat they sell off potted plants that are donated by the members. The pot party is the prelude to that where all the little shoots get dunked into their new temporary homes. I sure hope that folks like hostas because I think that we spit up and potted over 60 of them.
Back on the home front we have more or less finished the raised garden beds. All we are looking for now is the garden soil which I will have trucked in as soon as we get our next paycheque. In the meantime we have planted the six day lilies that we got from the Millers and marked out the spots where we will be planting the peach trees. Yep. Peach trees! Apparently the climate here is suitable to raise peach trees. But there's no such thing as Global Warming.
We also are on the prowl for some wine grape vines. I want to replace the decorative vines along one of our borders with wine grapes and I am planning two different ways to do it. First, we will plant the root, but secondly I plan to cu way back the existing vine and use its root structure to graft the new vine onto. Then in, oh, five to six years, we will be harvesting grapes to make wine. Grapes, too, grow well here, but our biggest challenge will be to keep the birds and racoons off them once they are approaching ripeness, and if we want enough to use ourselves we have to punt them off.
Our friend Ian has stirred the curiosity pot about property boundaries and we were out with the tape measure, measuring off from the available survey points. The thing about old towns like this one is that houses built 100 to 250 years ago were built before they hammered in the steel markers so we have some of them overhanging the town streets, some of them were built a little skewed, and, indeed, some of the survey markers were not where they were supposed to be according to the deeds. Makes for interesting discussions with the neighbours. In our case it turns out that the fence down one side of our yard is positioned too far into the neighbours and on the other side it is too much into ours. What fun! Fortunately we are on good terms with both and we really don't care, but our friend Ian has found that one of the back parkers is off by as much as five feet, so he wasn't too happy. There is an old saying that good fences make good neighbours, so I guess a corollary would be that bad fences cause confusion.
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05/04/2012, Shelburne NS
Here we are at the end of the week and already we have next week all set up. We are taking the MoHo and new propane tank in for certification on Tuesday night and we will continue on into Halifax and RNSYS to work on Nelleke and get her ready for launch. Hurrah! Salt spray soon to be in my face again! I figure that half of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday should be enough since we did a lot of it last summer when we brought her out. Then, probably the following weekend, we will bring her down to Shelburne, weather permitting, and put her on a mooring in front of the yacht club. Sigh! At least we will be able to get out on weekends for trips and in the evenings for work aboard. On any day that might not be weather enabling we can do more work on the house and garden.
This weekend the Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club will be putting in the docks and mooring field. One more step. Tonight there will be a dinner at the club accompanied by numerous libations and jocularity all round. We might go.
Speaking of the garden, we have the raised beds pretty much done. All we are waiting for now is the next payday so we can afford to get the gardening soil to put in them. We have a large one for veggies and a smaller but triangular and two layered for herbs and such.
We have also been drawn into a measuring chore for the depth of our property. Certainly this is a far cry from our life aboard where our property was measured by the dry bits between the stem and stern.
Shorter one today. Bye!
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