While the weather witches may not be smiling on us quite yet, at least they aren’t frowning. In fact, I think I can see the corners of one of their mouths turning up.

No, our weather software says that we could leave today and have less than 25 knot winds and waves less than 3 meters in height but that would mean reaching deep into the Gulf of Maine and then back out again. Whereas, a tomorrow departure would have us on a direct line to Cape Cod with lighter winds and leas less than two meters. As an added bonus, a tomorrow departure may let us get the outboard operational. I drove it up to the dealer in Pubnico and he was good enough to get at it right away. He got it running but said that it was running very rough. After some discussion and thought we decided that rather than take it as is and see if some one in the US can fix it, we would leave it with him for he rest of the day to see what he could do.

Beyond has their additional crew arriving today and they told us that they would be off as soon as everything gets stowed. They weren’t kidding when they said that. One moment I was on deck and they were getting ready, then I came below for a cuppa tea. After twenty minutes when I came back on deck, not only were they away but they had aLready cleared the most distant point you can see from here, the Sandy Point Light. Rob must have really been putting the horses to his engine. We wish them well and expect to see them on the US side of the Gulf.

Regardless, I was hoping that tonight we would be off this dock. Last night I was up every couple of hours to check the lines and ensure the fender-boards were properly placed. The one difficulty with the fuel pier as a dock is that Nelleke overhangs by at least 25% on the bow and another 25% on the stern. This makes it difficult to rig the lines so that there is enough to compensate for the 6 foot tidal range and still hold her in place so the fender-boards don’t shift. Nothing for it except to maintain them on a two hour basis or, and here is my cunning little brain at its feverish best, I can attach the fender-board to the dock. Yep. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll just have to remember to take them with us when we leave. That’ll leave us here where we can get ashore more easily and remain plugged in albeit to 15A. We also discovered that the club has water up at the clubhouse and with lots of hose we were able to fill the tanks after all. It involved using four lengths of garden hose, only one of them ours.

Upon return to Nelleke we hauled the dingy in and collapsed her for the first time. We had never done it before so it was a bit of trial and error but I was really surprised at how easy and quick it was. However, don’t let anyone tell you that inflatable dinghies are light. Sure ours is only about 50 pounds but they are board and awkward so that 50 pounds felt more like 150! Perhaps it is really a sign of the fact that I ain’t 20 years old anymore. We stowed the dingy and the inflatable kayak and lashed them and all their accoutrements to the deck for safe crossing. That, plus we put all the spare fenders and currently unused docklines away in the lazarettes.

Sigh.

We unloaded so much stuff and now it looks as though we haven’t gotten rid of anything.

Anyway, this afternoon while we were waiting to hear about the outboard besides squaring away the deck, I toddled off to buy a new strong flashlight since the one we had seems to have gone to that big battery bank in the sky, a couple more one pound propane cylinders and some square nine volt batteries for other lights. While I was busy at that, Barb spent the time in the galley preparing meals for our time at sea that we can keep in the refrigerator and just reheat when we need them. Pork chop casserole and chicken korma – yumm!