Things were going fairly well with the boat until Bill went up the mast to push a new, relatively large, wire down through it for a new tricolor light he wants to install. The tricolor is at the top of the mast, when you are sailing it displays a red and a green light, when you are at anchor it displays a white light. We have had a constant problem with the tricolor light we have now. It causes interference with our VHF radio so we can’t use both of them at the same time. That is a problem when you want to keep the radio on while at anchor, which we really would like to do. Bill decided to buy a new light that is made for incandescent bulbs but use LED bulbs in it. That would drastically reduce the radio interference and also use less power, always an important factor. So on the third or fourth trip up the mast to do the install Bill was finally ready to push the new wire down. He was on the top of the mast, I was inside the boat where the mast comes through the cabin floor. He had connected the new wire to the old wire he was replacing. He was pushing and I was pulling. That worked fine for the first ten feet or so, then it got stuck. He couldn’t push, I couldn’t pull, it wasn’t budging. We went to hire a rigger to help us. They are used to strenuous activities at the top of the mast and have tricks to deal with problems like this. We really hoped that he would be able to solve the problem because the next step would be removing the mast from the boat, no small feat. No cheap feat either. Well, luck was not with us this time. The rigger moaned and groaned for a while and that wire didn’t move at all.

Our plan was to leave today, go to the Seven Seas Cruising Association Gam (a gathering of cruising sailors) being held this weekend in the Rhode River (a few miles from here), and then to head south from there. Well, we are almost doing that, but not quite. We didn’t quite make leaving today. We have been running around like crazy trying to finish things up but today wasn’t going to happen. Oh well, that just means we miss the pot luck happy hour they have on the nearby island. We will leave tomorrow, by boat, and get to the Gam in the afternoon. We will hopefully find someone willing to drive us back to Annapolis to pick up our car so we can have it for the next step in the getting the mast fixed project. On Monday we are taking the boat to a marina close by where the Gam is and they are going to pull it out for us. Of course before that happens we have to take off three of our four sails, remove the boom, disconnect a bunch of wires, and all the stays that hold the mast up. We don’t know how long the whole process will take but we hope that the wire will be easier to install with the mast laying down flat instead of standing up straight. Our new goal is to head south on the Chesapeake Bay by Thursday.

The other thing that has changed this week is that our friends got a new dinghy and Bill really liked it. It’s exactly the dinghy that he has dreamed of as we slowly rode around in ours, getting wet. Bill usually ends up getting what he wants, so now, two days before we are leaving, he bought a new dinghy. That wouldn’t be so bad except for all the modifications and additions he had to make so it can work for us. We spent the last two days working on that. One advantage of having so much to do is you have to get up early. The picture above is the sunrise from our boat in our community marina. We don’t generally see the sunrise, and this was a particularly nice one.