Day 369, Year 6: Down Right Chilly Here

Day 369, Year 6: Down Right Chilly Here
Date: Friday, October 28, 2011
Weather: Partly Sunny and Cold-Daytime 40’s, Upper 30’s Overnight
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

In last night’s log I said, “But soon the water temperature will begin to drop and the nighttime temps will be lower.” Well, the water temperature didn’t change drastically overnight, but the air temperature did. The thermometer dipped into the 30’s for the first time this fall. And it was windy. So today when the thermometer read 45 degrees F, it felt more like 38 degrees. That wind chill factor really does make a difference. Since we still don’t have our heater/air conditioner working, we were relying solely on the oil-encased heater to keep us warm. It’s a good heater as a back-up, but not great as the only heat source. So it was 52 degrees inside the boat this morning. Thank goodness for our down-comforter. It kept me toasty overnight, but Mark had to add a polar fleece blanket. We brought home another space heater from Heather and Jed’s tonight, so it should be a little warmer in the morning. The forecast shows that the temps will then slowly get back up into the upper 50’s during the day next week, so we’ll have a bit of a reprieve. But we are supposed to get winds gusts up to 55 knots tomorrow night with a 100 per chance of precipitation. Yuk! Our friends Heather and Jon who left here on Tuesday for Block Island have now had to move to Montauk on Long Island because of the impending high winds. And snow is in the forecast, so they are wondering if they will ever get south. They will. Next week actually looks good, so hopefully they will make it to Norfolk and maybe further.

When we got back to the boat tonight, there was a young man on the dock. He introduced himself and said that he and his wife are going to be living aboard here this winter. They brought their trawler in a couple of days ago, but I assumed it was just another boat to be stored for the winter. We were delighted to find out we have neighbors. Chad and his wife Victoria have moved to Woods Hole fairly recently. He is in charge of marine operations for Woods Hole Oceanographic and Victoria works for SEA (Sea Education Association). They also own a houseboat that they keep at Shipyard Quarters in Boston where we lived aboard before heading around the world. We’re getting together tomorrow at 5 pm at the Captain Kidd to share stories.

Day 368, Year 6: Get Ready for a Good Laugh

Day 368, Year 6: Get Ready for a Good Laugh
Date: Thursday, October 27, 2011
Weather: Rain with Temps in the Low 50’s, 40’s Overnight
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Paul Simon needs to rewrite his song, “She’s Got Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” It needs to read, “She’s Got No Soles on the Bottom of Her Shoes.” Here’s the picture. It’s our anniversary. Heather and Jed give us a gift certificate for dinner out at the Landfall Restaurant here in Woods Hole. They had asked us our choice and we really wanted to be able to walk to the restaurant. I guess this is our version of “eat locally.” We figured we should look ‘decent’ so we dug clothes out of the closet that we haven’t worn for a couple of years. Well, actually Mark had worn nice clothes when he went to his conference this week, but I hadn’t worn these clothes since we arrived in New Zealand in 2006. I put on hose (which I hope I never have to do again as long as I live), a nice pair of slacks, a sweater and a jacket. I then donned my favorite pair of walking shoes that I haven’t worn since New Zealand in 2006. They are Ecco’s–not cheap–but if you have to wear shoes, they aren’t a bad alternative. Then we headed out into the pouring rain. I got to the street and all of a sudden I am walking on a slant. I look down and realize that the soles of my shoes are literally disintegrating as I walk. I guess the rubber in the shoe soles was not meant to be stored on a boat in tropical climates. When we got to the restaurant I asked Mark to walk behind me to pick up any offending pieces when they fell off. We made it in just fine, but when we walked out a couple of hours later, I left a trail of black rubber. By the time we got back to the boat, there were no soles left and I was wearing ballet slippers. I either have to invest in a new pair of dress shoes or not go where I need such an item. I like the latter alternative, but I think I will probably have to give in and buy a pair of dress shoes.

If we disregard the shoe event, our anniversary dinner was just perfect. We had oysters on the half shell as appetizers and they were delicious. We then had lobster for dinner. I had a version of stuffed lobster with extra lobster added and Mark had lobster pie. Both were absolutely delicious. Instead of wine, we had Cape Cod Pale Ale to drink and it also tasted great. So Heather and Jed, we can’t thank you enough for the gift certificate. We’re not big on going out to dinner because of the expense, but it was a wonderfully enjoyable evening . . . even if I didn’t really have shoes on! The pouring rain abated while we walked to the Landfall and then we sat inside watching the heavens fall during dinner. We were really dreading the short walk home, but all of a sudden the rain stopped. We left the restaurant immediately and as soon as we got back on the boat the rain commenced once again. We have been having some rotten luck lately, but tonight the rain gods were on our side.

The shoe event tonight was the second shoe experience of the day. When we got up this morning and looked outside, the world looked uninviting. It was raining and the temperature was much cooler than yesterday. Our attire these days is jeans, long sleeve shirts, and polar fleece vests. But up until today, we have continued to wear our Teva sandals with Smart Wool socks. But the weather today seemed to demand something more substantial than sandals, so we dug out our version of winter sneakers. These are cross between sneakers and hiking boots. We had hoped to delay wearing them until winter arrives, but maybe that was today. When I went to pick the kids up from school, the first thing Jonah said to me was, “What’s that.” He was looking at my shoes. I guess they didn’t fit his vision of what I should be wearing, but he quickly adapted. I now have the cold that both kids have, but today we were all feeling a bit better. Despite the ugly weather and their colds, both Sam and Jonah were delightful today. They are all excited about Halloween. Sam is going to be Superman and Jonah is going to be ladybug.

The case of the missing bag from yesterday continues. We searched everywhere today, but there was no bag. So evidently the bag was stolen as it is nowhere to be found. And after I sent the log last night, I looked at the hard drive that had been recovered by Cape Coastal Computers. There was almost nothing on the recovered drive that had been on the original. So that went back to the shop today. The really good news of the day, however, was that our anniversary present, the new Freedom SW 2000 Sine Wave Inverter/Charger arrived and is now installed and working beautifully. Mark was able to install it using the same connections as the previous inverter/charger which tells us that the connections were fine. We were never 100 per cent sure whether our problem was the old inverter/charger or the electrical connections, but now we know. The old Freedom 2000 had just seen better days. The next step is to get the reverse-cycle heater/air conditioner working. We’re waiting on a relay that starts the compressor motor. In the meantime we are heating with a DeLonghi SafeHeat oil-encased radiator heater. It heats slowly, but safely, and is keeping us plenty toasty with outside temps getting no lower than the 40’s. But soon the water temperature will begin to drop and the nighttime temps will be lower, so we will need the reverse-cycle heater.

Day 367, Year 6: More Tricks than Treats

Day 367, Year 6: More Tricks than Treats
Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Weather: Overcast and Cooler
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

I think I must be having pre-Halloween tricks being played on me. I went in to pick up my computer today and was told that they could find nothing wrong with it. They turned it off and on repeatedly and it always booted with no “screen display driver” warnings or delays as I had been having. I brought it home, tried to turn it on, and nothing. So the computer works in the shop, but not here. We let it sit a while and tried to turn it on again, and this time it booted. But clearly there is something wrong. I guess I’ll just continue to use it when I can get it to turn on and when it doesn’t, I’ll take it back to the shop. This is not a perfect solution, but it will have to do for now. Then there is the case of the missing LL Bean bag full of spices, very precious Madagascar vanilla beans, and other items. I took the bag to Heather’s today to make chutney and vanilla extract from the vanilla beans. I thought I put it on the front porch and asked Mark to take it out to the car at the same time I asked him to take out the trash. When we got home tonight, there was no bag in the car. We called Jed and he looked everywhere, and still no bag. All I can figure is that there is a feisty little Halloween ghost playing tricks on me and it is very frustrating.

Both Sam and Jonah have colds and were too sick to go to school today. Heather decided to stay home with them and she decided she would take advantage of the time at home by making chutney. Jed drove to work and handed the van over to me so I could go buy the chutney makings. I then delivered the goods to Heather and we worked together for the rest of the afternoon canning enough chutney to get us both through the year and we used the vanilla beans I bought in Madagascar to make vanilla extract. We used a whole bottle of Grey Goose vodka and half a bottle of Madagascar clear rum for another batch. If it works, we will have enough vanilla for the next decade. Making the chutney was a more familiar process. For years I have used the apple chutney recipe that is in the Ball Canning Book and now Heather and Jed do the same. So we combined efforts today and did a triple batch. I also picked what I think will be the last green beans from the garden late this afternoon. I’ve never had fresh green beans this late in the season and the plants are still flowering. But surely we’ll get a frost soon. There is snow forecast for other places in Massachusetts tonight, but the temperature here on the Cape is moderated by the water and we are just expecting rain and overnight lows in the 40’s. But sometime in the next couple of weeks we’ll surely get a frost and that will be the end of this year’s green beans.

So it was a busy day in the kitchen and the pantry is little fuller as a result. We had a great curry dinner tonight with the addition of the just canned chutney. It was delicious. During dinner Heather and Jed proposed a toast in honor of our wedding anniversary. Evidently it is tomorrow, but both Mark and I had forgotten. They announced that we will not be seeing them tomorrow evening as they are giving us a gift certificate for a special evening out. What a special treat!

Day 366, Year 6: Computer Up-date

Day 366, Year 6: Computer Up-date
Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny, Temps in the Upper 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

I was on the 8 am bus going into Falmouth this morning to buy a new external hard drive. Two of ours have failed recently, one that I had used almost daily for the past six years and one that I bought in North Carolina only four months ago. The life of this method of storing data is supposed to be four to five years, so we weren’t surprised that my one went. But the new one was a complete surprise. Yesterday the computer shop called and said that they could recover the data on the old drive but that I needed to bring a new one in for them to copy on. Thus, my early morning trip to town. I bought the drive and took the bus back to the computer shop. To my delight and surprise, I found out that my old IBM ThinkPad computer looks like it is up and running again. I can pick that up tomorrow and see how long it lasts. But the really devastating news was the newest external hard drive is really, really gone. They have me a brochure for contacting Drive Savers Data Recovery, but that is just too expensive. So I will have to rebuild and rewrite what I have lost. But what I did find out was that the old WD drive that they were able to recover data from is built totally differently than the newer ones. The old ones can be broken into and the hard drive taken out to be worked with. The new ones have no internal access, so when something goes wrong there is no way of fixing it. In addition, the older drives have rubber gaskets to protect them from movement, but the new ones do not. So the least little jar and your data can be gone. Sure wish I had known this bit of information years ago. I guess we have just been lucky until now, but we will certainly be more careful in our future choices. The computer shop isn’t certain, but they think they also have Mark’s old Sony Vaio running. I’ll go back in tomorrow and see for sure what runs and what doesn’t.

It was a beautiful day and I picked Sam and Jonah up from school and brought them here to Windbird for the afternoon. Both kids have a cold, again, but the sun was so bright and warm that we choose to do an art activity outside on the dock in the sunshine and then read a book there before we came inside for a nap. We have to find every excuse we can to soak in that warm sunshine before the weather turns cold. It is going to be cooler at night over the next few days and it is supposed to rain. So it looks like our sunshine will be going away.

Day 365, Year 6: A Year Is Not Always 365 Days

Day 365, Year 6: A Year Is Not Always 365 Days
Date: Monday, October 24, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny, Temps in the Upper 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

According to Wikipedia, a year is the orbital period of the Earth moving around the Sun. The Julian year is a unit of time defined as 365.25 days, and therefore we put in an extra day in our 365 day year every four years which we call Leap Year. A calendar year in the Gregorian calendar, as well as in the Julian calendar, has either 365 or 366 days. We have a seasonal year, a fiscal year, and an academic year and those years closely approximate the calendar year. But if you lived on another planet, your year would be however many days long it takes that planet to orbit the sun. Our planet is Windbird so there are Voyage of Windbird (VOW) years. These are “cruising years” and they have varied greatly. Windbird’s first world cruising year was 422 days long. That’s how long it took us to complete our “orbit” from Boston to New Zealand. VOW’s second year was 283 days. Year 3 was only 169 days long, while Year 4 was 175 cruising days. Year 5 was another long one at 362, and this, Year 6, is going to be more than 365 days. We will start a new year when we move Windbird to her winter home in couple of weeks, so even though we have hit the magic number of 365 today, we aren’t going into the next year quite yet. We have always started our years at the beginning of the sailing season and ended them when the sailing season came to a close. So we will just continue that cycle even though we are not doing long-distance cruising in the upcoming year.

Mark left early this morning to make his 11:30 am appointment at Mass General Hospital. He was supposed to have a stent put in between the bladder and the urethra to see if that would open things up a bit and allow him to urinate without using a catheter. But when he got there and the doctor found out he was on his way to a conference in Springfield, plans changed. Evidently Mark needs to stay in Boston a few hours after this procedure to see if it works. Whether it works or not, the stent will need to be removed at the end of the day by the doctor. Unfortunately, Mark didn’t know this, so now he will have to go back next Monday and plan to hang out in Boston for the day. Since that day is Halloween, Mark is thinking ‘Trick or Treat.’ If the stint works, it’s a treat. If it doesn’t, it will be a trick. If it works, he will then have what I call the rotor-router procedure done to permanently open up the passage. That will be done on a different day. If it doesn’t work, it’s business as usual self-catheterizing five to six times in a 24-hour period. So stay tuned until next Monday to see what he finds out.

I got truly disappointing news this afternoon. Evidently the data on my external hard drive that failed on Friday morning is not recoverable. I am truly devastated because there were so many files on that drive that exist no where else representing a huge number of hours. I guess I’ll just have to start over, but what a bummer. We still haven’t heard the prognosis on the two computers that they are checking for us, my IBM ThinkPad and our Sony Vaio. Maybe we’ll luck out and end up with at least one of those computers working. In the meantime, we will both continue to use Mark’s Acer that has a whole set of problems of its own. But at least it is working for now.

Day 364, Year 6: Bon Voyage, Heather and Jon

Day 364, Year 6: Bon Voyage, Heather and Jon
Date: Sunday, October 23, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny, Temps in the Upper 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Tonight we said our farewells to Heather and Jon Turgeon who are beginning their voyage to the Pacific aboard Evergreen. We got acquainted with them when we all lived aboard our boats at Shipyard Quarters in Boston. At that time, Heather and Jon were in their thirties and had already taken time off work spend a season in the Caribbean. They spent a second season in the Caribbean while we were sailing around the world, and this time they will venture further going to New Zealand their first year out. When I got home I dug up the photos from our Shipyard Quarter’s going away party six years ago. The photos show that we were certainly a happy group. When you look at the pictures, you’d think we were all half crazy. No wonder we loved the live aboard life at Shipyard.

Heather and Jon sailed here from Gloucester today and didn’t arrive at the Onset Marina until after dark. Onset is just across the Bourne Bridge on the other side of the Cape Cod Canal. We went up to see them tonight and went out to dinner at what appeared to be the only restaurant open in town. The setting was a little ‘rustic’ but that wasn’t important to us. We just wanted time to share information and wish them well. They will be in Onset until Tuesday morning, but Mark leaves tomorrow morning and won’t be back until Wednesday, so tonight was our only chance for all of us to get together. Jon and Heather are such a vibrant couple and we always enjoy their company. And we are so excited that they are finally headed around the world. Our time together tonight was short, but we will look forward to seeing them again when they return home to visit once they reach New Zealand. We hope they enjoy the Pacific as much as we did, and we plan to keep in touch and live vicariously through their adventures. I can already smell the fragrant Tiare and Frangipani blossoms and hear the songs of Heiva (welcome).

Otherwise, today was very quiet. I spent time at Heather and Jed’s doing laundry and baking pumpkin muffins with Sam and Jonah’s help while Mark worked at West Marine. Tomorrow he goes to Boston to the urologist at Mass General and from there he goes to Springfield in the western part of the state to attend the Eastern Public Media Conference. He will be taking the car and the phone that gets us on the internet. I hope to be able to send logs via HAM radio as we do when we are out cruising, but if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to wait until he returns on Wednesday night to send the logs. So I hope you will hear from me tomorrow night, but if not, no worries. I’ll be back on Wednesday.

051016 Boston, USA–Shipyard Friends Say Farewell