2010 Liftoff

"Travel not only stirs the blood ... it gives strength to the spirit." Florence Prag Kahn

The quote is from the wonderful log/journal that Stan and Connie gave us in 2008. The quote seemed appropriate since we are now traveling and I could probably use some strength of spirit.

The strength of spirit refers to another entry I've added to my growing list of things that most people are smart enough to know shouldn't be done even once. In this case getting hit by a car while I walking across the parking lot. Being small in stature and slow of foot, my serious aspirations for the NFL ended in the 7th grade on the junior high team. While other guys on the team were dealing 5 o'clock shadow I was wondering if I would ever weigh 100 pounds. So, now, twice, including the dock and ribs, I know what it's like to get hit by Ray Lewis, except that a Ford Explorer is even bigger than he is. Anyway, I'm just a little stiff and sore and probably will be for a few more days.

The ribs and cold weather not withstanding, we thought to be under way several weeks ago. Given all of the projects that we have completed in the last few weeks that hope was either naive or stupid or both.

On Wednesday, we got the last serious issue completed when we took the boat out for a few hours to calibrate and sea trail the new auto-pilot I installed last September. Technology is great! The sea trial was not going well, so I called RayMarine from the cell phone, they gave me a trouble shooting tip which I completed, all the while underway. Now it works like a charm.

Then there was the 48-hours the boat spent out of the water while we had the seals around the inside of the propeller shaft replaced. We went to St. Mary's for a visit since we could not stay on the boat. The old St. Mary's is pretty, picturesque and quaint. We walked around the docks for a while and talked to other boaters and then had a great sea food dinner at Lang's restaurant where the food was promised to have come from Mr. Lang's boat, probably the only local sea food we've had in two years. For desert, we had this great sunset over the marsh ...

The biggest project was to try to trim the boat. Some guy was walking by and commented that our boat was listing badly, e.g. it was leaning to port and down in the stern. The trim had never been good but when I had the third house battery moved to the port lazarette and we bought the Honda generator a bad situation got much worse: about 550-lb in less than 2-sq. ft. This is a lot on a boat that weighs less than nine tons. So, two trips to Jacksonville, FL to buy lead ingots and one trip to Savannah, GA to buy bags of lead shot along with some weight lifting plates from the local Walmart and we've added over 700-lb. in various nooks and crannies. The good news is that the boat is in trim and we can make some adjustments as things change. The bad news is the extra weight which may have increased our draft an inch or so.

It sometimes seems that all we have done is work on the boat, approximately true is not literally so, a white bottomless pit into which we pour time and money. However, at St. Mary's there were some cautionary examples of why that is necessary. This was a sailboat, there's a winch for the jib sheet. So was this.

So ..... at long last, we're off, putting Brunswick to our stern and headed for the Fernandina Beach mooring field. We'll lay over there one night while some thunderstorms pass and then head offshore for a two day run to the Ft. Pierce Inlet and then the Vero Beach mooring field to visit cousin Les and Jean. Cool weather, some wind, some seas and it's great to be underway again.