Day 263, Year 11: Windbird Update
Date: Monday, July 11, 2016
Weather: Mix of Sun, Clouds, a Little Rain, High 71 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Studio #8, Falmouth, MA
The time has come for an update on Windbird. On March 8, I wrote in my log that a decision had been made to put Windbird on the market. It was a heart wrenching decision, but a decision that needed to be made. Since then, with the help of wonderful friends and family, I have reported on how Windbird has been emptied and made ready for the transition to new owners. What I have not reported is that we do have a couple who has made an offer that we accepted. The survey and sea trials were set to be last Friday, but we ran into a little hitch. The place where Windbird was to be hauled out for the survey was too shallow and Windbird was sitting in the mud at high tide. There was no way to get the straps under the boat so she could be raised out of the water. So our agent, John Schwab, is searching for another location with deeper water. Unfortunately the chosen surveyor doesn’t have another appointment availability for at least a month, so a second surveyor will be chosen to do the bottom survey. Once that is done the prospective buyers make their final decision. We knew, through the agent, the first names of the prospective buyers—Sam and Dawn. And we knew they were planning to become live-aboard cruisers. We also knew Sam is a pilot and that they currently live in Minnesota. Over a month ago, Sam sent a comment to this blog site, but I somehow did not see his comment until late last week. I felt terrible that he has written and I had not responded. My only excuse is that it has been a VERY busy time. But when I did finally read Sam’s comments, I learned his last name. I Googled that and found that he has a blog focused on aviation. I quickly read through his most recent posts and saw that he was sharing online that he and his wife are seriously considering purchasing Windbird and that Sam was starting a new blog to deal with their new sailing life. It is called “Weigels on the Water” and Sam said we could share the site with our readers. It can be found here: http://wotwater.blogspot.com/
Sam and Dawn have been reading our blog and now we are reading theirs. It is so exciting to learn about the couple that we hope will be Windbird’s new captain and admiral. Sam and Dawn are much younger than we thought, have some sailing experience through charters, and are obviously eager to learn more. Windbird can teach them what they need to know, and being able to follow Windbird’s new adventures through Sam and Dawn’s blog would be quite a gift to us. Sam said it best in his email to us, “There will always be a piece of you in Windbird and always a piece of Windbird in you.” So true!
Life as usual continues here. Today was a Camp Oma day. We started with swim lessons at the beach, followed by playing at the beach, and then headed home when the sprinkles arrived just after noon. Mid-afternoon Sam and Jonah went to play at a neighbor’s home and Ollie and I played together. Ollie wanted to ride his little green John Deere tractor on the street as it is almost impossible to peddle it on the lawn. So he got dressed in his farmer overalls and off we went. When we returned home, Ollie wanted to do some gardening, so we headed to the garden and weeded, hoed, and raked to get ready to plant seeds. We had hoped to plant arugula as the old arugula has gone to seed. But we found that we had no arugula seeds. That task will have to continue tomorrow.
