October 13th, 2009 Deltaville, VA
Over coffee we watched the anchorage empty while checking the weather. It was plain to see that today was the day to make the last leg of the Chesapeake. It was going to get cold, windy and rainy for the foreseeable future. But we had things to do here and there are worse places to be socked in.
I went ashore to see who was around and found Rick and Linda on the hard in our spot. They had lightning problems this summer as well and are here letting the marina do the work. (What a concept?)
I also found Roger and Jane of " Sereno 55" parked next to "Tilt"... it seems that Craig just returned to Michigan for the funeral of a friend and won't be back for a week or so.
When I returned to the boat, Kathy had the laundry ready to go and had spent a considerable amount of time cleaning the cockpit floor. It looks better than it has in weeks. Tom of "Perseverance II" had called and was on his way to pick up his crimping tool that had been passed to us from some of his Canadian friends. He arrived in his two-seater 1964 Mercedes convertible... and was kind enough to drive me on a couple of errands around town. We had a nice lunch before returning to the boatyard.
The aundry was backed up so there was really no reason to take our clothes over yet but we did pay our daily usage fee and took the car to the grocery and vegetable stand. Linda rode along with us to pick up a few things as well.
After taking the groceries back to the boat, Kathy took the clothes ashore to get in line for the washing machine while I worked on topping off our fuel tanks. I make two trips to the fuel dock and by the time I was done, Kathy was almost finished with the wash.
Meanwhile, and this is cool, Rick had yelled at me from shore to come in or give him a call. He had mentioned this morning that his radar was being replaced even though it had been working fine for a month. It is the same ours but has three times the range. I told him that I'd be interested in taking it off his hands if the insurance company okayed the deal and so in the afternoon he called them and got the ok.
What he really didn't want was to have the Boatyard get their hands on the unit... and resell. Anyway, I walked over after refueling and he gave the thing to me . . .Wow! If we're lucky it may be a plug and play. The transmitter seems to have the same type of plugs as ours. We'll have to wait and see, but I am hopeful that it will be an easy swap. At the worst, I'll have to snake a new wire down the mizzen mast.
With clean clothes and a new radar we returned to the boat just at dusk and went to work on supper. While is was cooking we put the outboard on the rail and hoisted the dinghy on the long shot that we might be able to travel tomorrow.
We had a great meal of escalloped potatoes and ham with sautéed spinach on the side, and then watched some old "Cold Case" reruns before bed.