It’s been a pretty tough week with unfortunate weather and health issues.

At least we finally got the boat back together! It’s not 100% complete but its good enough to start letting our friends see it. It looks really great, as long as you don’t look too closely. Of course now I am all nervous about messing it up – that is something that I am going to have to get over. We excel at messing things up!

This weekend is the annual gathering of our sailing organization, the Seven Seas Cruising Association, in Annapolis. We worked hard to get the boat ready to be able to sail to the Gam, as it is called. We went back and forth on whether we wanted to go by boat or car. Bill is still varnishing our pull down screens so the boat doesn’t have any screens on our hatches right now. Then we saw the weather report included a lot of rain and wind. Then it got even worse, a hurricane was heading north. For the past two days we’ve been watching all the reports. They haven’t been sure what track the hurricane, Joaquin, was going to take. In the past we have taken the boat to our nearby hurricane hole and slept on it during the storm to make sure the boat was safe. Yesterday that was looking like a distinct probability. We also considered taking the boat to the Rhode River where the Gam is being held. We thought we could probably get a protected spot to anchor there. Then it seemed like it wasn’t likely the hurricane was going to come this way so we decided just to prepare the boat the best we could in the marina. We spent hours in the rain tying up the sails and putting extra lines on the boat, as you can see in the picture above. Late today the reports seem to say that the hurricane won’t be coming up the Chesapeake Bay. That is much better for us. We will keep watching until Joaquin passes.

Besides all our worrying about the hurricane it hasn’t been a very good health week either. Bill’s leg has been continuing to change every day. We have been working on the premise that the kind of gross changes are proving that the treatments Bill has been getting are working. This week Bill had his third infusion. We always see the Annapolis oncologist before the infusion. She made it clear that she didn’t think the treatments were working at all but she was willing to let him have his third treatment. This is completely different than the impressions that the Johns Hopkins oncologist has given us. Hearing her say that was kind of a slap in the face. Even worse though was, after trying to process that information, Bill asked her to approve the colonoscopy he has scheduled in a couple of weeks. She told him to cancel it. She said it wasn’t really worth the risk to scan for cancer somewhere else when he already has cancer. When pressed further she said they don’t do diagnostic scanning for people with his life expectancy. We were both in shock. Bill decided she has given up on him. She is not a melanoma expert so she is probably not up on other possible treatments. The Johns Hopkins doctor has already told us at least two other treatments we might be able to try if this truly is not working. Bill has a call into him to see what he has to say about his current status, and maybe to find a referral for another oncologist in Annapolis who might know more about melanoma. In the meantime Bill has another CT scan scheduled in a couple of weeks. Hopefully that will tell us more about what is really happening in his body.

For now though we are going with the theory that we are still going cruising in another month. We should be able to make a more educated decision in another three weeks. Until then we are going to continue to get ready. We are hoping that in our next blog update we will finally be able to show you some of the upgrades we have made on the boat.