hot but not blistering hot ... yet

today was 91 degrees. We are on the hard which means we get no real good breeze come running thru the cabin. The deck heats up during the day and the teak is so hot that I cannot walk on the deck without shoes but Ben can. (he has tough feet) at night around dusk the air cools off to about 76 or so but the cabin now radiates the heat inside the cabin and it gets hotter at night until around 11pm at which time I can fall asleep. We met our friends Jen and Maxwell (we met them last year in Deltaville they have a similar boat that is called a Baba so of course we are kindred spirits) Anyway we got a look at their boat and the varnish was starting to come off. Others have told us when we go south the varnish will actually blister off the wood. So i can't say it is blistering hot yet.

I had some people feeling bad that we are not in the water yet. Yes, we would like to be in the water asap but being here is all apart of the experience. We are where we are and we will get to where we will be all in due time. yes, it is frustrating on some level about our stuckness here but on the other level you get to actually meet and get to know some really nice people. We get to do projects that we thought we could never do. Our to-do list is growing not shrinking. Each day we think... oh yeah we should do that too.

today's accomplishment was to find holes in the dinghy. we set out to take a joy ride on the dinghy and in doing so we hoped to see obvious leaking going on... Ben brought his new camera so I drove the dinghy (I'm not such a good dinghy driver ... yet) He took pictures of the osprey and I got a great feather. while we were just coming in I noticed a guy in a boat that we had met last year! I said are you Jerry? yup! He was the worker at Fawcets marine store he knew what kind of boat we had by the o-ring from our sink. how amazing is that? we stopped by and chatted while we stayed in the dinghy. then we started to leave and here sailed up Jen and Maxwell so off we went to greet them hardily! We have been following their blog on sailing this past winter as we plan on doing the same thing possibly. (sailing to the Bahamas)

still we had not found the leak in the dinghy... we pulled it out of the creek area and put it on saw horses and filled it with water then sat underneath and sure enough there was 3 drips in different areas. now about the rubber sides... we took soapy water and washed over the round blown up parts and sure enough we found one more leak. I suspect there is more than one on the rubber tubes but finding them might be a bit hard. now the time was about 4pm and super hot. I was done for a while even though we had not fixed anything, i was content with knowing we know where the holes are and the next cool moment we will patch them.

let's see the boatyard got the old wires pulled out of the mast, I think that is all they accomplished this week. dreary but true. On the other hand we have called the manufacture of our chartplotter and radar and we are ready to do some wiring ourselves. We'll see how brave we get.

for those of you that love lists here is our current list of to-do for just Ben and I... figure out how to wire our Garmin/GPS to a computer, hold everything we are sitting inthe cockpit and the mosquitos are eating me up... eeeek!!back to the list: fix dinghy holes, get dinghy license, help Keaton ( the lady with the nice sandy beach) fix her little sailboat, make a mount for the outboard motor (dinghy motor) we we can put it hanging off the back end, make stern light mouth and afix it to the stern pulpit, (our old one broke), rigging: chalk under the plates to make them more water proof so we don't get leaks underneath, change cotter pins on the safetly lines, (the insurance co wants us to do that), put in two outlets that have a ground fault, run wirers, continue sanding the blocks and paddle, go and buy: zinc, radar reflector, propane, cetol varnish, a propane sniffer, make boat logo and business cards and sew a misquito netting for the companion way. there you have the list for now. always something to do and I'm sure we will expand this list at the same time we will be knocking things off we keep adding to the list.

time for bed!!! last night we did not blog cuz we were up til almost 1pm playing dominos with Dave and Lynn.

love you all,

May God's creation smile upon you today!