I am staring to get seriously annoyed. I had hoped to start this weekend off with a bang and get a big jump down the coast maybe as far as Norfolk, likely to Cape May, at least to Sandy Hook, but I am beginning to think that there is a conspiracy against us or something. There is a lessening of the wind on Sunday for a day and then it picks up again. I am beginning to think that we will be making our way down the Sound and through NYC to at least get off the dock and be making some progress. This is starting to look too much like last year's cruise! Not as if that was a bad thing, I was just hoping to get something new under our keel. We will probably set off on Saturday at least as far as Block Island and then decide how far and where we will be going from there.

When we do get off, we will be attending a ceremony just off Block Island with Screech. Jay's Dad, a CPO in the USN was buried at sea just off the island. Jay has the coordinates for the original ceremony (interment?) and we'll be paying our respects. It is sort of fitting that we will be doing so close to Remembrance Day and I concur with Barb's assessment in her post yesterday that Remembrance or Memorial or Veteran's Day is not something that I would attribute the phrase "Happy" with. Although, to be fair, the fellow was honouring it in his own way by passing on his wishes and he was being friendly.

I had a really bad moment yesterday evening when the Canadian Forces Superannuation people took $1200 out of my bank account rather than putting some in which is how I always figured that pensions are supposed to work. Some mad thrashing around on the internet and phone calls back to Canada and we have sorted it out. It turns out that they had sent us a check for return of contribution overpayment and they in turn had overpaid us by the $1200. They were merely clawing it back. The problem was that I didn't realize that they had sent us the original cheque and we hadn't deposited it.

I just noticed that we have had over 25,000 visits to the blog as of yesterday. I understand that most are repeat visitors but since the counter only counts each once per day, after that they are ignored for the purposes of the count, this is a very flattering number of friends and visitors. Thanks for the encouragement and support.

Tonight we will be going out to Screech for dinner. Mary Lou has promised us a pizza and as I recall she does a great job of those so we are quite looking forward to it. For our part we are contributing a bottle of wine and some jumbo shrimp for starters. To get our contribution we had to go back up Memorial Drive to the grocery and liquor stores and while we were there we also got some more hardware to finish some of the jobs in the cabin and make the final repairs from the Bermuda bouncing.

True to the forecast, the wind has piped up and we are happy to be snug alongside with the heater running and hot tea at our elbow. This is supposed to continue for 48 hours before starting to lie down so we are resigned to being patient. One of the other boats on the other dock has run lines across the water to our dock to hold him off his during the storm so we are bound in here like a fly in a spider's web. We ain't goin' nowhere!