Day 183, Year 9: Gone Fishin’
Date: Sunday, April 21, 2014
Weather: Sunny with a High Temp of 60 degrees F
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, North Falmouth, Massachusetts
The public schools here are closed this week for spring vacation. Ollie and Jonah are always at home on Monday and today Sam joined them. So mid-afternoon, Mark and I went over to see if we could do something fun with the boys. Jed needed to go to work for a bit and Heather was trying to get Ollie down for a nap, so Mark and I took the boys to get a Dairy Queen swirl cone and we were off to Fiddler’s Cove to go fishing. We went by the house to leave a “Gone Fishin’” sign, but I was unsuccessful in sneaking in the house without Heather hearing me. Ollie couldn’t breathe when she tried lay him down for a nap, so she was just holding him. He wanted to go with us, but was just not feeling good enough. It was just too pretty to stay inside, so he convinced Heather to take the big wooden rocking chair outside to rock! That must have been an interesting site. We didn’t have much luck fishing in the cove, but it was fun to try. And both boys reminded us that it takes ‘patience’ to fish. They are certainly right about that.
I am sick of being sick. I have had some sort of upper respiratory issue since November, but I now have a full-blown cold. The boys have actually been healthier this winter than in the past, but you couldn’t tell that by our situation this week. Ollie and I were both worse today. Jonah is recovering and Heather says she feels a bit better, but she is still not able to go to work. Sam, Jed, and Mark have escaped so far, and let’s just hope they can be spared. This is no fun and certainly no way to spend the spring vacation week! But we are trying to make the best of it. Since Windbird comes out of the water two weeks from today for bottom painting, the plastic bubble we have been living in will have to come off. And before that happens, I really wanted to get the cockpit coaming varnished. So that process started today. Mark sanded and taped and I varnished. That is coat # 1. Tomorrow morning before Mark goes to work and I go to help out with the kids and do some gardening, we will sand and do varnish coat #2. I need to get at least five coats of varnish on, so we will continue this process on the days when it is not raining. Even though we are under cover, if you varnish when it is raining, the humidity is too high and the resultant finish will not be as good. It is supposed to rain tomorrow night and Wednesday afternoon but Thursday and Friday look great. So hopefully I’ll get this project completed before the cover comes off.
After we finished the varnishing project, Mark and Lee Kaufman down in Little River, South Carolina, tried to contact each other via ham radio. We haven’t used the radio much at all since we returned in the summer of 2011 and the attempts today weren’t all that successful. So thank goodness for telephones. Mark and Lee stayed on the phone while giving each other directions for which station to try next. We can hear Lee better than he can hear us, but we are going to have to keep working on this.
