Day 233, Year 6 Technical Difficulties
Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Weather: Rain Overnight, Partly Cloudy Day, Upper 80’s
Location: Lightkeepers Marina, Little River, South Carolina

Things don’t always go as planned. The “younger” generation of my family, meaning the 40 and 50 year-old nieces and nephews, had a bit too much fun on the beach last night and weren’t able to get up this morning to go deep sea fishing or to come to Windbird. So this was the first “technical” difficulty and as a result, Mark and I spent the morning doing some much needed chores on the boat. We then went to my sister’s house and cooked for five straight hours for tonight’s dinner. I made 40 salmon cakes, layer upon layer of fried green tomatoes and dozens of chocolate brownies for tonight’s dinner. My sister made three huge hash brown potato casseroles and my sister-in-law cooked pinto beans and creasy greens. The result was a good old southern West Virginia feast ending in a make-your-own fudge brownie sundae. The bummer was our inability to share the slide show of the Voyage of Windbird due to the second technical difficulty of the day. We were using our old Sony Vaio computer with it’s multi-media docking station and something has gone haywire inside the docking station that is not allowing the computer to charge when it is plugged into the station. So we had to start the slide show at the beginning of Year 3 and still only made it as far as Malaysia when the battery power ran out. So we took a break, cleaned up the clubhouse we were using for tonight’s gathering, and then got to watch only the South African piece of Year 6. After spending every day for a week and a half doing nothing but putting the program together, it was so very disappointing to not be able to share it. But we have had even more equipment failures this week, telling us that our computers are not going to make it much longer. My faithful IBM ThinkPad is having more and more difficulty booting each day and Mark’s Acer wouldn’t boot at all this morning. He thinks his problem is the cable coming out of the power supply and we think my IBM is just getting too old. Hopefully between the three computers, one will work long enough to get us back to Cape Cod where we will have to try piecing them back together.

Since today didn’t go as planned, who knows what will happen tomorrow, but the plan is for everyone to spend time together on the beach tomorrow and then have a full-moon dinner party on the beach in the evening. A number of family members leave tomorrow, but we will still have at least 24 people feed. By Thursday the number dwindles to 21 and everyone is on their own for dinner. I have to stop cooking and start preparing for our passage north on Saturday morning. The wind has been from the north which is a real no-no for heading north in northbound Gulf Stream. But today it switched to the south which is good. It looks like we could be doing a fair bit of motoring on the latter half of the five to six day passage. But one way of another, we should be home on the Cape by Thursday or Friday of next week-just in time for our grandson Jonah’s second birthday.

110614 Day 233 The Carolinas, USA–Family Vacation, Day 4