With beautiful pre-Forth-of-July weather we return from our friend's Larry and Karen Decker's house and Larry's (ahem) 39th birthday!

A great time was had by all..and getting some much needed rest for ourselves was even greater! It was a much needed and peaceful break and going to their house is like stepping inside a current edition of Better Homes and Gardens! I swear they have plants and stuff there that only grow in South America or maybe out on Venus! We'll miss them, their friends, family, and all the goings-on over there. We did at least manage to rope Karen in as our overseas mail and business contact...Thanks Karen!!!

Back at boat...With the weather being good and eye lid surgery over, I now have run out of "goofing off" excuses...30 days-to-go before retirement and one or two weeks after that we should be underway! Feeling the time crunch again this morning...guess I had better get back at it.

Ordered the wind generator and solar panels yesterday! They should be here in a couple of weeks. The wind generator has to go up on the mast and the solar panels go on the aft side rails. Getting these two items ordered was nice to get done as they are so important to our whole energy package! We chose to go ahead and get them now but they don't absolutely have to be installed until later if it becomes necessary do to time constraints.

Our concern for departure is our small self-imposed weather window for off-coast sailing. Going down the Washington, Oregon, and California coast can be tricky business...especially Wash and Oregon! For those of you who live here, you know that as it starts to move further into fall, the weather can get weird...cooler days, fog off the coast, increasing wind speed, and for us, bigger wave sets, higher winds and just weirdness with counter-currents and other big ocean things. With all this in mind, our departure window-of-opportunity tends to decline and get narrower.

Sandy leaves today to go back north to a friend's house to do some sewing on our sails (say that 10 times real fast :). I get to go back to work in the engine room and tackle the re-fit. For anyone who has ever worked on a car engine...try to imagine crawling into your closet to work on it. Underway, it's like working inside a washing machine!! Of course after you get in and settled you always remember the tool or part you forgot so by the time you get "un-pretzeled" and back out, then back in, you're pretty much done for that day- ha! So be it...it's the life we chose!

Ray