Day 328, Year 7: First of October
Date: Monday, October 1, 2012
Weather: Winds 25-35 Knots SW, Bright and Sunny
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
The first of October 2012 was a windy day here on the Cape. It has settled
down now, but I had trouble getting the dinghy to the dock early this
afternoon due to the winds. That has never happened to me before here, so I
believe the reports when they say the winds were blowing 25-35 knots. What
I can’t believe is that it is already October. It was such a beautiful
summer and somehow I think I thought it might last forever. But alas,
summer is over, fall is here, and we have only thirty days until we leave
here and sail south. I worry that we might not be ready to go. But then
when I really think about it, we are always ready to sail, so what is there
to do? We will make sure our water tanks are full and we will have to go to
Falmouth and fill the fuel tanks. I’ll have to do a last minute supermarket
run to get fresh veggies and meat, but we have most everything else we will
need. Mark does need to work on putting in a new antenna and a new ground
plane for our Ham radio and he is going to start work on that tomorrow. He
is also going to hook up a new-to-us radar display. Our old one is now
unreadable and last week a cruiser came into West Marine to buy a new radar
system. He offered Mark his old one as it is the same model as ours and his
display still works. Hopefully Mark can change our old display out for the
‘new’ one and we’ll be in business again. I need to finish varnishing the
Dorade boxes and who knows what else needs to be done. But we figure the
rest can be done in Little River. It is a three day run to the Delaware
Bay, another day into the Chesapeake, and then three or five days south to
Norfolk. Or it is a three-an-a-half to four day run directly to Norfolk.
Either way, we’ll top up on fresh food in Norfolk and then spend seven days
or so in the inland waterway before pulling into Little River, South
Carolina. This is a little community north of Myrtle Beach and it will be
our home for a few weeks before we head on to the Bahamas in January. My
sister lives about six miles from the marina where we will be staying and
good friends, Lee and Lynda Kaufman also live close-by. We’ve decided not
to try and take our car down, so we’ll have to figure out transportation
once we get there. My sister tells me that biking is just too dangerous
with the traffic that comes with the winter snowbirds and there is no public
transportation. But then I think, where do we need to go? I’m sure I can
go food shopping with my sister and we can just figure the rest out when we
get there. The month of October will be another busy one for us. Jed goes
to Italy next Monday for a week, so we will be helping Heather in the
evenings. When Jed returns, his parents come for a few days, and then on
October 20th Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco arrive. We can’t wait for that and
we want to have everything else done before they come so we can just enjoy.
Heather had to take Oliver to the doctor this afternoon and then to the
hospital for some testing. It appears that Oliver has RSV, human
respiratory syncytial virus. In the US, statistics tell us that 60 per cent
of infants will be infected with this virus during their first season, and
almost all children will have been infected by the time they are two or
three. Oliver appears to have a very bad cold with a runny nose and some
wheezing. And unfortunately for Heather, it means he needs to held in an
upright position through the night. Sam and Jonah also have their first
colds of the season, so there might not be a lot of sleeping happening at
the Goldstone’s tonight.
Mark worked at West Marine today and I stayed home this morning to put
another coat of varnish on the Dorade boxes and to do a little cleaning
inside the boat. Dust has accumulated on all of the louvered doors, so it
was time to clean them. I then went to Heather’s to do some laundry and can
green beans. Tomorrow we will make apple sauce and maybe some more apple
butter, so I will head over there early in the morning.
