Now that's it's all over but the high fiving, I can confess - I was more than a little apprehensive about lifting the mizzen mast and putting the stainless flat bar under it. I had visions of any number of things going wrong, from being unable to unstick the pulpit from the deck support and ripping a big piece of the decking away, to having some moron go flying past in a powerboat and kicking up a wake that would have Nelleke rocking underneath the mast and damaging the bolt holes that fasten the pulpit to the boat. But none of this happened. The lift and lower took less than fifteen minutes from start to finish and we were back at the dock for the party that I spoke of in the post yesterday. Whew!

Today we spent putting additional epoxy around the stainless bar and the bolt holes that are now exposed and putting the cabin ceiling back up. With my muscle spasm in my back that was less than fun, but with Barb's help and perseverence now it's all done.

We also went out to the Customs facilities at the airport to get our Nexus IDs approved which took about 20 minutes for each of us. We were interviewed by a US and Canadian customs officer and at the end everything was finished except for the retinal scan which they couldn't do since their computer was down. That'll mean another trip out to the airport, but that's no big deal as they were both very friendly and personable fellows, apologetic for the extra stuff we had to do and really good ambassadors for their respective countries.

On the way home we went in to the embroidery place where we have had all the crew uniforms done so that I could get a new hoodie, plus we went to the Binnacle where besides buying the epoxy to finish the mizzen project, we also got some towel racks to put up in the heads to facilitate drying of the bigger bath towels. We also went to a Staples to get stocked up on printer cartridges and wound up buying speakers for the boat's computer as well. Now we can watch movies on that monitor without having to fire up one of the laptops. This will be particularly good once I put up the high quality monitor that I got from Kevan at MarineNav.

Tomorrow will be a day for going aloft in the mizzen to take down the old radome and put up the new one. Barb can't wait as it is the last "big" thing that is lying around in the cabin. We are slowly getting things put to rights below.