Gary sent me some photos from the boat. This one is Bud coming up into the cockpit. You can see the newly varnished grab rails with the blue tape around where they fasten to the deck. Bud still has two coats of polyurethane to put on but he put up the dodger without the windows. He said he can still get at all of the grab rails. Gary helped him put up the bimini, too. You'll also notice our life raft is back out on deck ready to lash down, and has one of our electrical cords to hook up to shore power coiled on top of it. And you can see the cockpit cushions dumped out onto the cockpit seats. The key here is that all of that stuff had been stored below and Bud had been working around it. He is now working on putting what goes on deck up on deck, and resurrecting the interior.

Bud also got parts and repaired our stern rail grill. An important piece of equipment for a group of guys sailing off the east coast of Florida and crossing the Gulf and planning to catch a significant number of fish. We'll see how that goes.

Bud bought a used spinnaker pole at the Sailor's Exchange and two ends for it that will fit the fittings on our mast. Now he just needs to get the old ends out (they want them back) and put the new ends in. And he needs to get new line for the system that raises and lowers the end of the pole on our mast. That line finally gave out. To replace it, he needed to take down the top fitting, which required someone to go part way up the mast. Bud was going to have Gary hoist him up, or vice versa, but there were 30-knot winds over the weekend, and then Bud realized both he and Gary are over the weight limit for the boatswain's chair. I told him he would be better off paying the rigger than to risk one of them falling. Today they managed to persuade Gary's stepdaughter, Cheryl, to give it a try. She was able to get the fitting off and no one was hurt!

Another bit of news is that our new propeller made it from England to Tennessee. It's sitting there waiting for some information that needs to be faxed. Since Gary does importing from China, I figured he'd have the means to fax from his home. Well, almost. His fax machine is sitting in a box in the garage waiting for a yard sale because he hasn't used it in three years. But he's going to dig it out to send the fax for us; so hopefully in a couple of days the propeller will arrive.

Not much happening on the Texarkana side. The bad news is that Jamie is back to work tomorrow. She spent most of her days off trying to make up for the sleep deficit from working 194 hours on nights over two weeks. But I take comfort from the progress Bud is making on the boat.

p.s. Gary just sent me a photo of Cheryl up the mast, I'll add it to the gallery.