Day 331, Year 7: Boat Work
Date: Thursday, October 4, 2012
Weather: Overcast with Temp in the Upper 60’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
I’m holding my own with this cold but was fairly useless today. Mark, on
the other hand, had a very productive day. He installed a new ground plane
for the Ham/single-sideband (SSB) radio and connected a new connecting cable
to the radio’s antenna which is our backstay. In the past the ground for
our radio has been a flat strip of copper foil that ran the length of the
boat under the floor. It was fairly useless as copper disintegrates in a
marine environment, so most of the time we really had no ground and this
means radio doesn’t transmit and receive as well as it should due to
interference. Mark read about this new ground system in a cruising magazine
and ordered a KISS-SSB Ground Plane System (radial counterpoise system).
Instead of having to install something that runs the length of the boat, the
KISS system is only 10 feet long. He did have to take the mattress off our
aft cabin bed to work underneath where we also store our batteries, but it
was much easier than taking up all the floor boards to install something
underneath. We won’t really know how well this works until we sail south in
November, but stay tuned if you are interested. We will report on how well
it works in our logs as we sail from here to South Carolina. I also want to
mention here how nice it is to once again have a dinghy that we don’t have
to inflate morning and evening. While we were in Boston last week, we sent
the dinghy in for repairs. And so far, so good. The dinghy was returned to
us when we got back to Woods Hole on Saturday and it has held air ever
since. So we’ll call that repair a success.
Tomorrow and Saturday, Mark works at West Marine. Tomorrow I head to
Heather’s to babysit Oliver while she teaches a science lesson in Sam’s
kindergarten class and then does her ‘real’ public radio work. I hate to
think it, but in the afternoon, I believe we need to process more apples for
canning. A few weeks ago we never wanted to see another tomato and now
we’re starting to feel that way about apples. But in the middle of the
winter, these things will taste so good.
We had high hopes of sailing to Nantucket this weekend, but the weather and
work schedules are not going to allow that. Mark works on Saturday and
Heather works on Monday morning and in between, the weather forecast is for
precipitation and dropping temperatures. Tomorrow the temp will be around
70 degrees F with a nighttime temp of 60 degrees. But by the end of the
long weekend, the daytime highs will be in the 50’s with the nighttime temps
in the 40’s for the next week. This will be our first taste of cold weather
and we’re really not looking forward to it. Jed will be in Italy at a
conference next week so if it gets really cold, we might spend a few nights
with Heather and kids. We can always use our oven to warm the cabin, but in
case the cooler weather stays with us, we are looking for possibilities for
moving to a dock onshore so we can plug in while Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco
are here beginning in two weeks. It has been a fantastic summer and a warm
fall so far, but the forecast indicates that the ‘good times’ are going to
be replaced by seasonably cool temps. Burr . . .
