by Judy Handley | Nov 3, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 6 |
Day 375, Year 6: Snow Country
Date: Thursday, November 3, 2011
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny Day; Daytime Temp in the 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Brrrrrrr . . . we drove north to Concord, New Hampshire today and as soon as we were out of Boston, we started seeing some piles of snow along the road. I know I heard that there was snow in the Northeast over the weekend, but not until we got to Concord and found the ground still covered with a few inches of that white, fluffy stuff did the reality really hit me. The last time it snowed in Concord for Halloween was over a hundred years ago! I sure hope this is not a precursor of a colder than normal winter. But despite the snow today, the sun was shining and it felt warm while we were working in the storage unit. It is usually freezing when we are there, so we stayed a little longer than usual and really tried to go through things. We have a much better handle on what is there and we came away with winter coats and clothes for the cold time.
This evening we went to a Concord Yacht Club meeting. It was great fun to see old friends, the dinner was fabulous, and we truly enjoyed the speaker. Mark Klinker, a Concord cardiologist who decided to spend six months as the physician at the South Pole. He has always had a fascination with that part of the world and his photographs depicting day to day life in that VERY chilly part of the world were fascinating. After the yacht club meeting, we came back to Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg’s home. It was great catching up on what has been happening in their lives. All in all, it was a very successful trip. We just hope we don’t take any of this snowy weather back to the Cape with us tomorrow.
by Judy Handley | Oct 29, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA |
Day 370, Year 6: Passage to New Mexico for Christmas
Date: Saturday, October 29, 2011
Weather: Totally Overcast, Rainy, Chilly, and VERY Windy
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
When we got home from the Captain Kidd this evening, we got on the computer and continued searching for the cheapest way to travel from here to New Mexico to visit with Justin, Jo, and Ziggy. We talked with them last night and decided that a Christmas visit would work for all. So we searched all day and then we searched all evening trying to find fares that we can afford. We actually ended up deciding to travel by bus instead of flying. That gives us the option of leaving Woods Hole on a bus and not having to worry about where to leave our car in Boston. And when we return, we can hop on a bus in Boston and be home in less than two hours. On our way out to New Mexico, the timing is such that we will be able to get off the bus in Albuquerque and then ride the New Mexico Road Runner train from Albuquerque to Santa Fe where Justin and Jo will pick us up for the last part of the journey. If we flew out, we would have to spend the night in a hotel in Boston in order to catch the 6 am flight out and we would have to spend the night in a hotel in Albuquerque waiting for the flight home. The bus will cost us just a little more than the flight for one of us. It will be slow, but we have convinced ourselves that it will be like being on passage. We’ll take our headlamps and at night we’ll use them to read, alternating with trying to sleep. This little venture will certainly give us a chance to see what the bus system is like in this country. It is a slow way to travel, but we definitely have more time than money, and it is certain to be an interesting trip.
We got the last of our computers and parts back from the computer shop today. The Sony Vaio went in because of a keyboard problem and it still has a keyboard problem. They installed a new one but found that it was really the connection of the keyboard to the mother board. Instead of spending $300 for a new mother board and $100 for installation, the computer shop recommendation is to buy an external keyboard that plugs into one of the USB hubs or just abandon this computer and buy a new one. The good news of the day was that they were able to obtain all the data from my old external hard drive that crashed. That doesn’t give me back the photo changes and writing of the past four months, but at least I have everything prior to July of this year. After checking with the drive recovery business the shop here recommended about my new external hard drive, we have decided that the minimum cost quoted of $700 and going up to $2800 to get the data off that drive is just not worth it. I have already started the rewriting and am going to start reorganizing the Year 1 photos today.
We spent the early part of the evening at the Captain Kidd having drinks with Victoria and Chad, the young couple we met last night on the dock. Both of them have traveled extensively and it was fun to share stories. They spent their honeymoon in Savusavu in Fiji and we both agreed that the people of Fiji just might be the friendliest in the world.
They are very interested in hearing more our travels, so we hope to get together with them at least one more time before we leave Woods Hole to go to our winter home at Fiddler’s Cove.
I don’t like it when the outside temperature is lower than my refrigerator temp, but that is the case tonight and it will continue to be the case through the next few months. Ouch! Once we get to our storage unit in New Hampshire and get appropriate clothing for the cold months I’m sure we’ll feel a bit better about this, but after spending most of the past six years in the tropics, the onset of winter is especially tough. Right now the winds are howling and the rain is pouring outside, but at least it is warm here inside Windbird.
by Judy Handley | Oct 25, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA |
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.
by Judy Handley | Oct 24, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA |
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.
by Judy Handley | Oct 23, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA |
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.
by Judy Handley | Oct 22, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA |
Day 363, Year 6: 174 Charts
Date: Saturday, October 22, 2011
Weather: Partly Sunny but Cooler, Winds Calming
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
A great deal of today was spent sorting through the 174 charts we own. When our friends Jon and Heather arrive tomorrow night, we want to be able to offer them charts for their trek around the world. But before we could do that, we needed to do an inventory to see just what we do have. Most of the charts we have were never used as we relied almost entire on electronic navigation. However, we certainly did have paper charts in case something went wrong with the electronics. We had the paper charts . . . just in case.
We started the day by taking the car back into the shop to get the repairs completed. We also went to the computer shop so Mark could read what I had written on the work orders and add any further directions. At the end of the day, we have a car, but we still don’t have our computers or external hard drives back. They said they would be able to tell me by noon on Monday whether the data on my hard drive can be recovered. In the meantime, I am still wondering around a bit dazed, hoping my photo files can be recovered. While in downtown Falmouth, we took some photos. Falmouth was founded in the late 1600’s and the green surrounded by churches is a very much New England.
In last night’s log I talked about the battle of the boots between Ziggy and Jonah. Take a peak at the photos attached to this log to see Jonah in his bright red ladybug boots and Ziggy in his pink, furry-topped boots. Too cute!
