Last night as I lay in my snug little bunk I had two epiphanies. Well, one is a modification of an earlier epiphany so I guess that would be an epiphany of an epiphany. Since we are not coming south this fall and will be staying in Shelburne until next year, it suddenly hit me. This is our 2017 cruise! We should be checking out new and different places, not just spots to try to make northing. That will open up a whole new world of places to stop and length of trip legs.

The other Revelation was to find out that the Boat Store here at the marina was able to order the replacement bulbs and get them here within two hours. We also bought a new holding tank vent filter and another filter for the water hose for when we are putting fresh water into the tank. These latter things are great, by the way. We have been using them for the last couple of years (they are good for one season) and the list of things they are good for is phenomenal: aluminum, bacteria, bad taste, cadmium, chlorine, fungus, heavy metals (I thought that cadmium was a heavy metal, oh well), hydrogen sulphide, iron, lead, mercury, mould (I thought that was a fungus, oh well), odour (I thought all of the above would have been odour as well, oh well), turbidity, cloudiness. I guess they can be excused for stretching a point or two since the damn things do work so very well.

I have installed the new bulb and Huzzah, we are once again in COLREG compliance. That is a load off for sure. Please, Nelleke. We really are sorry for deserting you for 2 years. We won't do it again. Enough punishment, please.

I must say one thing about the weather, if I may, and the only reason that I dare to do so is because I have had enough "locals" say the same thing. This is abnormally hot and it has been getting even more abnormally hot with each succeeding year. Wow! When someone from one of the southern states complains about it being too hot you just know that it's toasty. I wonder if the folks that have been saying that there's no such thing as global warming ever get out of their air conditioned homes, or their air conditioned cars, or their air conditioned offices. There is one fellow we know who lives in a dockominium in Marathon, Florida and he introduced us to the Tiki technology of a tiki thatched roof on his dockside building. Using a laser thermometer he was able to show that the thatched roof was a good 15 degrees cooler than a metal one which is what he started with. There were a lot of tiki huts in Florida but I haven't seen any up here.

As for us, it is simply too hot and humid to do much of anything after 1100 or before 1900 during the day. It's like the Sahara though, at night the temperature goes from 33+ down to 16 degrees. Who'd a thunk I would be thinking that was cool. A tag on Facebook even claims that this east coast heat wave will be taking temperatures in Boston up to nearly 40! Can you imagine?! Baked Bean Town!

Here aboard, in the cabin, during the hottest part of the day R2 is struggling to hold the temperature down in the mid 80s. As I just finished remarking to Barb, I can't imagine what it would be like down here without it. Over the next two or three nights we will be anchoring so there won't be any power, unless we want to start up the generator, which is a definite possibility, but we will be out in what should hopefully be a breeze and that, with the wind scoops should cool us down a bit at night. During the day we should be underway so we should get some relief. This heat wave is supposed to break mid week, so we have our fingers crossed. As for tonight, we are BBQing everything outside to try to keep the heat in the cabin down and we will take R2 to bed with us tonight to make it bearable.