Day 311, Year 6: Making All Manner of Plans
Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Weather: Another Beautiful, Warm Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Today was all about making plans-for our trip north to Boston and New Hampshire tomorrow, for Labor Day Weekend, and for the winter. We left Windbird at 7:20 am and rowed to shore. We just haven’t put the dinghy motor back on yet and are finding it so much easier to raise the dinghy without the motor that we might just keep rowing. We pulled into the parking lot in front of West Marine. Mark was saying what a long day it was going to be working from 8 am to 5 pm, and then he checked his calendar on his Smart Phone and found that he was two hours early. I hate it when my phone is smarter than I am and I’m sure Mark felt that way this morning. With the extra time, we decided to drive north to Kingman Marine where we are contemplating spending our winter. It’s about 15 miles north of here on the Buzzard’s Bay side of the Cape. We kept our previous boat, Sky Breaker, there for a few seasons in the late 1990’s and Heather lived aboard the boat at Kingman for one of those years. When we pulled into the parking lot, we felt like we were home. Woods Hole is new to us and still doesn’t feel like home, but Kingman Marine is familiar territory. A neighbor of Heather’s operates the travel lift at Kingman and he brought us a winter contract a couple of weeks ago. The problem is that our contract in Eel Pond ends the end of October and the winter contract with Kingman doesn’t begin until the middle of November. We met the marina manager, a young woman named Tara, and she explained that we can pay 75 cents per foot per day and come in on November 1st, but that will cost us almost $500 for half a month. We’ll have to check with Woods Hole Marine here in Eel Pond and see how much they will charge if we stay here an extra couple of weeks. More and more we are thinking that we will be spending the winter here so maybe living aboard with no heat for those first couple of weeks of November will get us prepared for the colder weather to come.
After our visit to Kingman, I dropped Mark off at West Marine and went to Heather and Jed’s to work in the garden. Somehow I found other things to do until almost noon, but then I went out and started pulling weeds, and pulling weeds, and pulling weeds. My goal was to get the entire garden weeded and then plant a fall crop of spinach, kale, and Swiss chard. I guess I was a little too ambitious as I didn’t get rid of all the weeds and I didn’t get anything planted. But I did make progress. I’ll go back on Friday and finish that job.
Last night we confirmed that our friends Kevin and Claire, currently living in Virginia, will be arriving on Saturday. They drove from Virginia to the north shore of Cape Cod today to stay with Claire’s sister who is vacationing here. On Saturday they will drive from the north shore to Woods Hole and spend the rest of the holiday weekend aboard Windbird. My nephew Tommy’s son Josh is also arriving on Saturday. We talked with him this evening to confirm that he is driving down from Manchester, New Hampshire to on Saturday morning. Josh is spending his first year after college with AmeriCorp doing a City Year in Manchester. We are very excited that he is going to be able to spend the weekend with us. Unfortunately Mark has to work all weekend, but he’ll have evenings with us. We’ll all spend Saturday doing the Cape Cod beach thing and on Sunday morning after Mark leaves for work, we will sail the boat to Martha’s Vineyard to do a day of exploration there. Mark will take the ferry over after work and spend the evening with us. Then we will get up super early on Monday and sail the boat to Falmouth in time for Mark to get to work at West Marine at 9 am and then we’ll head back to Eel Pond. Josh will have to drive back to New Hampshire and Kevin and Claire will head back to Virginia. Getting off the Cape on Labor Day is always a traffic intensive experience, but we’ll try to gage the timing to minimize the misery of waiting to get back across the Cape Cod Canal.
Now for tomorrow. We are leaving here early and driving north to our storage unit in Concord, New Hampshire. We are taking a few things there to store and are planning on picking up a few things that we will need as the weather turns cooler. We will meet our friends Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg for lunch and then drive back to Boston for Mark’s 3:15 pm appointment with a neurologist at Mass General Hospital. We wish we had more time to visit friends in Concord, but Mark has to be at work at 8 am on Friday morning. So we have to get back here. Alan and Helaine just got back from visiting their son’s family in Reno. They got to visit with our son Justin, his wife Jo, and Ziggy on Monday and this weekend they are sailing to Boothbay in Maine. They are going to call Heather and Jed when they get there and see if they can get together. Lucky them. They might get to see all three of our grandchildren in one week-something we only get to do once a year.
At this point it looks like we are going to continue to have this beautiful weather through the weekend, but Monday looks very stormy. We’re keeping an eye on Katia, the next named storm heading this direction, and hoping she decides to fly somewhere else. So we’ll watch carefully and in the meantime, enjoy the glorious weather we are having this week.
