It seems that Mike neglected to mention something significant to us Northerners who are still thawing out – it got up to about 76 degrees F today!!! Very pleasant indeed.

I was thrilled to see the cookbook and the booklet emerge from the shipping box today – hot diggity, our ideas in print! Now we will both spend time with a red pen and post-its and get ready for the second edition of both.

Now it is time for griping – I’ll swear that boat architects and designers are either stupid or malicious – their boat creations might look all sleek and lovely when they are launched but when it comes time to effect repairs one needs to be an intelligent, strong but skinny contortionist to get the job done. Come on, you all know what I mean. I watched and listened to the two mechanics removing Paula Perkins – not easy at all to undo all of the connections and it barely fit through the hatch - and then Mike finally tracked down what we hope is the last leak in the pressure water system. He was lying on his side with both his arms stuck in an impossibly small cavity trying to figure out the best way to route around a pinhole in a hose to the forward head sink. After much sweating and straining and cussing he decided that there is nothing for it - we will have to make another trip to a supply store and buy a length of reinforced hose and replace the bit with the hole as there was not enough slack in the hose to cut off a bit and rejoin it to the system. It is a good thing that the engine is out as the area where said hose feeds through is between where the engine would be and the Filter Boss system – if the engine were there the job would be even more difficult.

Mike made a great pasta sauce tonight between the clean out of thirty three years of grunge that was under the engine and the discovery of the water leak. So we have just had a lovely supper accompanied by absurdly inexpensive and palatable grocery store Merlot ($3 a bottle). We had better not stay here too long or I will be an absolute lush!

Tomorrow, depending on the water hose fix, we might take off for Baltimore to take care of the cruising permit task. It would be great to NOT be here when the boys are installing the new engine.