Day 349, Year 8: Ollie and ‘We’
Date: Friday, October 18, 2013
Weather: Repeat of Yesterday . . . Mostly Sunny and Warm (low 70’s F)
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

‘We’, Mark and I, are having so much fun with Ollie and I think Ollie is having fun with us as well. Mark spends a lot of time each day doing his public radio consulting work, but he’s always right there to help out. And Ollie loves it when Granddad plays with him. I had planned to take Ollie to the public library for storytime this morning, but he REALLY did not want to get in the car. He wanted to play outside. And who could blame him? It was a beautiful morning, so we played in the backyard and in the garden. He helped me pull up the dried corn stalks that we can use to decorate the front yard and he helped me pull weeds and take them to the compost. He put them in his little doll stroller which worked great for transport. By noon, he was so tired–but he didn’t want to come inside. So Mark took him for a stroller ride. He fell asleep almost immediately and when they got home and I put him in his bed, he slept for another two and a half hours. While he slept, I canned vegetable mineral broth. This was a mainstay for Mark when he went through chemo the first time. I use it instead of water when cooking. It is jam-packed with vitamins and minerals, so it was good to get 14 pints canned today. When it was time to pick Sam up from school, Ollie happily got in his stroller for another walk with Granddad.

We started our day by moving Windbird from the dock back out onto a friend’s mooring in Eel Pond. The couple that owns the dock, John and Ellie, are in their eighties and their extra income is from the dock rental. Normally only Star, the sailboat owned by Steve and Irene from Nevis, is on that dock. But since Steve is undergoing radiation treatment for colon cancer, they have moved their boat to Boston and the dock is open. But the daily charge is $30. This is fair enough, but more than we can afford. So when we got up and the winds were favorable, we untied our lines and headed back out into the pond. We will probably leave Eel Pond at the 4 pm bridge opening on Sunday (the last opening of the day now that we are into fall hours), go through the Woods Hole Cut, and spend the night in Hadley Harbor in Buzzards Bay. Then on Monday morning, we will sail or motor up to Fiddler’s Cove. We have to arrive there right at 10 am in order to enter on the high tide and since the first bridge opening in Eel Pond is at 8 am, we can’t make it without heading out the night before. We went aground going into Fiddler’s Cove in November of 2011 when we tried to enter a couple of hours before high tide, so we’ll not try that again. It would be easier to wait until Monday of the following week when we could just leave Eel Pond when there is slack tide in the Woods Hole Cut and then go directly to Fiddler’s Cove. But the forecast for nighttime temperatures this coming week is in the 30’s. That means we’ll need to be plugged into electricity in order to run our heaters. So we’ll just have to do this move in two steps. We also want to go to the Wellfleet Oyster Festival on Sunday and we think we’ll do that and just plan to get back to Woods Hole by 3:30 pm. So some things never change. No matter what, we never seem to sit still. We are always on the move.

I can’t end this log without noting that on this day in 2005 we sailed out of Boston Harbor on our voyage around the world. We have had a phenomenal eight years since then and look forward to the next eight. Cancer or not, we sincerely hope our sailing days are not over.