Day 360, Year 6: Rainy, Rainy Wednesday
Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Weather: Overcast and Rainy, Temp in the mid-60’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Pouring, pouring rain. That’s what we’ve had since sometime during the night, but the intensity keeps increasing. By sometime tomorrow afternoon, the radio weather forecast tells us, it will be sunny. But at this point that’s hard to believe. In the meantime, the temperature keeps rising, so at least it is not a freezing rain. It is supposed to be 70 degrees tomorrow but then the temperature slowly drops to give us daytime highs in the low 60’s and nighttime temps in the 50’s heading into the mid-40’s by late next week. Now that we are on a dock, we can actually plug in a heater. We haven’t needed that yet, but by late next week I think that will change. So the good thing about being at a dock is the electricity and the ease of getting ashore, but the negative is that Windbird no longer points into the wind, whatever direction it might be blowing from. So if the wind and rain are coming from behind us, it blows right into the cockpit. And that is what it is doing tonight. Tomorrow we will get out the plastic curtains for the back of the cockpit to keep this from happening again. But this one snuck up on us. We knew it was going to rain, but we forgot that we no longer point into the wind as we did on the mooring. I guess the moral of that story is that we are slow learners, and slow learners get wet.
We had a delightful lunch in Woods Hole today with Jane and Bruce Wooden. Bruce works with Jed and when we came here to visit while sailing around the world, we often stayed at Bruce and Jane’s. They are headed south on Friday to Florida and from there on a cruise for a few days. It was great to see them and we will be anxious to hear about their travels when they return. We are waiting for the arrival of Jon and Heather Turgeon who will be sailing here from Maine as soon as the weather calms down a bit. Their cruise (on their sailboat) south will eventually take them around the world, and we will look forward to hearing about their travels as well. I guess we are becoming armchair sailors, at least for this winter. But that’s okay. We’ve had our turn and now it is our turn to enjoy the adventures of others for a bit. No worries, however. We aren’t done with our travels. We’re just taking a GK (grandkid) break.
The next few days are going to be busy ones, especially for Mark. Tomorrow morning the same man who repaired our refrigerator a few weeks ago is coming to check out our reverse-cycle heater and air conditioner which seems to have a leak. We haven’t used it since we lived in Boston, but we tried it out in North Carolina. It turned on, but didn’t cool. We no longer need it to cool, but soon we will need it to heat, so hopefully that will get going tomorrow. Mark works on Friday and Sunday, and on Monday he goes to Boston to Mass General and from there to Springfield, Massachusetts for a two-day public media conference. We’re contemplating driving to Concord on Saturday to get our dock steps and some warmer clothes and shoes. We’re still wearing our sandals with wool socks, but when it rains, that is no fun at all! And in there somewhere, we hope to be visiting with Heather and Jon. And we’d like to go off Cape to pick apples. There’s just never enough time.
