by Judy Handley | Nov 12, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 4, Year 7: Messing About on a Saturday
Date: Saturday, November 12, 2011
Weather: Still Very Windy; Temps from low 40’s to low 60’s
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
I’m not sure we accomplished anything much today. But it was a nice, relaxed day doing a little of this and a little of that. The wind here in the marina is incessant and we see little relief until Wednesday. It is not quite so windy away from the water, so we enjoyed the few hours in town. We went to Heather and Jed’s before 9 am to pick up Jed and the boys and go to the soccer field. The field is right across the street from the beach, so the south winds we are getting blew right through the field. It was chilly, but not as chilly as last week. After soccer, we took Jed, Sam, and Jonah to downtown Falmouth to meet up with Mommy at the library and playground across the street. Mark and I then went to the supermarket to do a little stocking up and then back to Heather and Jed’s to sort through some of the things that we have stored in their basement that need to be sold. Mark took photos and on Monday morning we will start listing these things on Craig’s List. We had lunch at H & J’s and then we came back to Windbird. I continued my update of our Year 1 logs (a never-ending job) and Mark bent the conduit piping that will become the “roof rafters” for our winter cover. Mark also fixed dinner tonight so I could keep working on those Year 1 logs. So, the day was just a mix of this and that, but it was relaxing. Since I didn’t keep the boys yesterday because of the holiday, I have felt all day like it is Sunday. But when I check the calendar, it tells me that tomorrow is Sunday. Mark works at West Marine and I am going to be keeping Sam and Jonah while Heather and Jed do some off Cape shopping and then go to a public radio event in the late afternoon. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, is speaking in Woods Hole. This American Life is a public radio show that presents stories of everyday people and Ira Glass has sometimes been called the American storyteller. He is a fantastic speaker and we know Heather and Jed will enjoy the show.
by Judy Handley | Nov 11, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 3, Year 7: Eleven, Eleven, Eleven–111111
Date: Friday, November 11, 2011
Weather: Overcast Turning Partly Sunny, degrees F
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
111111–I’m feeling very binary today. Next year we will have 121212 and then we won’t have these repeating numbers until 010101 (2101). Guess we won’t be around for that one, so hope you enjoyed today and will enjoy December 12 next year. I read on a website today that the number 11 “lends itself to some interesting peculiarities” in the base 10 number system. I was fascinated to see the following examples:
(2 digits) 11 x 11 = 121
(6 digits) 111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
(9 digits) 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321
I’m just thankful that the temperature is not 11 degrees tonight! The temperature barely reached 50 degrees F today, but it felt even chillier. Right now it is 45 degrees F outside but feels like 36 degrees because of the wind. Tonight it will get down into the upper thirties. Tomorrow it warms up a bit and I like that. Yesterday when it was much warmer, Sam, Jonah, and I sat in the cockpit and watched the sun go down and the full moon. Tonight the moon still looks full. It was so much and yellow that it looked like it was putting out warmth. I’ll take it!
We started our day with another hour-long walk in our new neighborhood. We then slowly got ourselves together and headed north. We could drive 20 miles north to a Home Depot, get the conduit we needed, and then return home. Or we could drive 23 miles further, go to IKEA to get some good chocolate and more bags of Swedish meatballs AND go to Costco just to check it out AND go to Home Depot, all in the same shopping area. It was still totally overcast when we left, so we opted for the longer trip. Thankfully, the sun popped out, still amid numerous clouds, but the remainder of the day was much cheerier. Our reason for going to IKEA was simple-chocolate. We stopped at IKEA on our way home from New Hampshire last week and I picked up a bar of dark chocolate. It was really good and made us realize that our ’round the world supply of chocolate is gone. The chocolate that you can buy anywhere around the world is Cadbury. This is a British product and quite good. (Note: If you buy Cadbury in the US you have to make sure it has been imported from England in order to get the creamy taste.) Anyway. Mark had requested that I stop and buy him some chocolate on the way home from Heather and Jed’s last night. I stopped at the corner store near their house and the only option was Hershey’s. I’ve always loved Hershey’s. Great chocolate, right? Wrong. After we had dinner, Mark opened his milk chocolate bar and I opened my dark chocolate. I took one bite and almost spit it out. It truly tasted like wax with a little sugar added. I’ve been eating dark chocolate from Madagascar and this Hershey bar was a shock. How could something I have always thought I loved taste so bad. Mark can eat almost any chocolate, but his milk chocolate bar also turned him off. So we drove 53 miles to IKEA today to buy a winter’s supply of 99 cent chocolate bars and to have a $2.99 IKEA lunch. Not a bad way to spend a cold and windy day. We then went to the nearby Costco store just to check it out. We are not members and we found out today that a membership costs $55. We went to Costco with my sister and brother-in-law in North Carolina and were amazed with some of the deals on food. All we did today was get a visitor’s pass to look around. I wrote down the prices of those things that we would stock up on and I will have to check prices at the supermarket here to see if it would really be worth it to buy the membership. Then we went next door to Home Depot. I love how they make it so easy to move from one place to spend money to the other. We bought the conduit we need to make our winter cover frame and checked on the price of Christmas lights. We have a huge container of old lights, but some work, some don’t, and none of them are LED. Right now you can get up to $5 off a new string of LED lights if you bring in an old non-working, non-LED strand. You can do this for up to five strands. When we lived in Boston, we strung lights up the forestay and backstay before covering the boat so Windbird could be lit up for Christmas. We hope to do this again. These three stops took us all afternoon, so the sun was setting as we headed home. Neither Mark nor I are big on shopping, but we enjoyed our slow-paced window shopping. Mark got to play on new computers at Costco, and that made his day.
Tomorrow we will pick up Jed, Sam, and Jonah at 8:45 am to take Sam to his last soccer game of the season. Heather has to be at work at 8 am to do fundraising, so she will take their van. After soccer, we will come home and start building the winter cover frame. And surely we can find some time to eat some of that chocolate!
by Judy Handley | Nov 10, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 2, Year 7: Proudly Announcing Another Goldstone Boy
Date: Thursday, November 10, 2011
Weather: Overcast and Rainy, Temperature 60+ degrees F
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
Today we finally got the ‘clearance’ to announce that there will be a third edition added to the Goldstone household in early April . . . and it is a boy. A girl would have added a different dimension to our all boy’s team of grandchildren, but the only thing any of us is really concerned about is that it is a healthy baby. Heather and Jed didn’t want to know the sex for the first two, but they had decided that when Heather went in for the ultrasound today they would go ahead and find out. Sam and Jonah both want a baby brother, so they were delighted with today’s news. Actually, I’m sure Jonah wouldn’t care one way or another, but because big brother Sam wants a boy, Jonah got on that bandwagon. Sam is at the age where he says girls are yucky, so he was especially happy with mommy’s news. And Mark and I are delighted at the prospect of another grandchild.
The outside temperature was already 60 degrees when we got up this morning. We decided to go for a walk to see just where it is we live despite the fact that it was lightly misting on us. We walked for more than an hour and thoroughly enjoyed the walk in our new ‘neighborhood.’ We stopped by Dick and Claire Wiklund’s home, but they weren’t home. Then we walked up to Main Street, down to the little store we visited last night at the corner of Wild Harbor and Main Street, and then back down Wild Harbor to the marina. We miss the long walks we always took when in foreign ports, so we are going to try and walk every morning. Many trees here lost their leaves when Irene came through in late August, but many of the smaller trees and bushes and are now in full color. There are deep red, blazing orange, and bright yellow leaves making the fall season quite beautiful here on Cape Cod.
Mark stayed on the boat this afternoon while I went to pick up Sam and Jonah. We went to their house this afternoon since it was raining. In my absence, Mark got on the computer and searched for job possibilities. We promised ourselves we were going to find jobs to repay the cruising kitty when we returned, but we haven’t looked very hard. Unfortunately Mark is down to working only one day a week at West Marine and that will probably be the case until spring. We didn’t realize that tomorrow is a holiday, so Sam and Jonah don’t go to school. That means Mark and I will both have the whole day and we are going to spend part of the time listing things we need to get rid of on Craig’s List. And we might make a trip off Cape to a Home Depot to buy the aluminum conduit we will use to make the frame for our winter cover. Tomorrow is going to be windy and chilly, a good day for shopping, but then the next four days should be in the 60’s. We will try to get the frame built before it gets chilly again.
by Judy Handley | Nov 9, 2011 | Cape Cod, USA, Sailing Logs Year 7 |
Day 1, Year 7: A New Year
Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny and Warm, Temp Still in the Upper 50’s
Latitude: 41.38.821 N
Longitude: 070.38.162 W
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
It’s the beginning of a new year for Windbird. Year 6 has ended and now we are into Year 7. This will be the ‘Year of Living Aboard’ rather than a traveling year. Windbird’s years follow the cruising season calendar, so our move to Fiddler’s Cove yesterday signaled the end of the season for us. Year 6 started when we arrived in South Africa last October. We traveled more than 8,500 miles from South Africa to Woods Hole during the year and saw some incredible things along the way. This next year will focus on grandchildren rather than travel adventures, but grandchildren are pretty incredible as well. And living aboard during the winter should provide some pretty interesting writing material, so I hope you will follow along with us.
Mark started his morning with a walk to the office to find out how to log into the free wireless internet provided here. When he returned, we went about the morning’s big task of taking Windbird out of the slip, turning her around, and bringing her back in again, stern first. Our slip points almost northeast and it is from that direction that we will be getting our winter storms. John, who I think is the yard manager here, suggested yesterday that we turn the boat around to point into the wind, but he suggested that we do it near high tide which was this morning. He, along with two other helpers, came to assist us. If you are a sailor who reads Cruising World, Fatty Goodlander’s article this month is about Med Mooring and it gets right to the issues of backing up a sailboat-in Fatty’s very humorous way. Sailboats just don’t back the way you need them to go. They have a mind of their own and you never know exactly where you’ll end up. We pulled and out, turned to the left, then started backing up. We were right on course for the slip when all of a sudden we turned and our stern was headed toward shore, sideways to the dock. We went forward and came way too close to a fishing boat across the way. At that point Mark told me to try and throw lines to the guys on the dock and have them pull us in. I successfully threw one line, but I knew I could never throw the other one as far as needed. So Mark came out and did it. It all worked because we had three guys from the marina on the dock ready to catch those lines. . The office and yard folks here are incredibly friendly and helpful. In fact, I can’t think of a marina we have ever been in where the people are so helpful. That, plus the beauty around us, gives this location a high rating from us at this point. After the successful turn around of Windbird, Mark hooked up the hose and gave the boat another thorough rinse down. We are very pleased that the AwlCare we applied to the hull is still doing its job. Water beads show that we don’t need to apply another coat before winter. I know we are both happy about that. I cleaned the dinghy and scrubbed the covers of the cockpit cushions. And then we hoisted our signal flags up the back stay in the hopes that the flapping flags will keep the birds away. So Windbird is squeaky clean outside and hopefully the birds will stay away so we can keep her this way.
It was another lovely, warm November day, so I couldn’t resist bringing the boys here for the afternoon. They put on their life jackets and we all scrambled into the dinghy for an explore. Actually, I just put a super long line on the dinghy and we floated about and then pulled ourselves back to the dock with the rope. Sam had a small net and he used it to paddle us about a bit. I was quite impressed with his ability to use a net as a paddle. He quickly figured out how to use it to make us go in different directions. While Sam was doing this, Jonah and I were floating a small mooring ball and just enjoying the sunshine. When it was time for naps, Mark had to take the car in to have new tires put on the front. This was supposed to happen when we had the tie rod replaced, but they could only get one tire at the time and it was not the right kind. The motor for the driver side window also stopped working a few days ago and the garage had a used one that they installed this afternoon. The work on the window motor took all afternoon, so Mark didn’t get home until after 5:30 pm. Jed came and picked up the boys and Mark and I are spending a quiet evening on the boat. We did drive to the little store that is about a mile away. It is the oldest business in the area, dating back to 1840. It has been renovated to look as it did when it was built and I can see that we will be making many stops there over the winter. So at the end of our first full day of living here in Fiddler’s Cove in North Falmouth, and at the beginning of a new year of the cruising life, we are very pleased.
