Dun dun, dun dun, Friday the 13th. Between the wind, pelting rain, slapping halyards (the ropes that raise the sails) it was a restless night. I don’t think either of us got much sleep.
As twilight finally approached, I got up and made some coffee, wrang out the wet towel around the drippy mast, swiped up the condensation around the port windows that like to drip, then threw on my jacket to go up top, then headed to the marina lounge to look around. I figured I’d better see if anything had blown onto us (branches, spare parts), or off of us (sail covers, spare parts). The mainsail cover had been laying up top on the butterfly hatch (from when we started to put the sails up) and I noticed that when I looked upward at twilight that I could see light – no sail cover laying on the butterfly hatch.
The rain stopped. The wind’s still howling and it’s cold outside. The little heater is working well! Didn’t quite realize how well until I went up top. Brrrrr… There’s quite a bit of long pine needles, oak and maple leaves, bark and other debrii all over the deck area but everything still looks intact. Down the ladder and avoiding the puddles I made my way towards the marina to see if I could walk the docks. Here's a radar picture of the weather patterns - note how we're in the red area.
Nope. The docks are all still under water. Joe & John asked if we were ready to go into the water – they were by the boatlift and I told them they must be kidding right? Yes they were kidding. Chatted a bit with them and I’m almost afraid to say “we’re going in the water tomorrow”. Everytime I say that, something comes up.The tides were still flood stage at 5 ft above high tide. So nobody will be going into the water until tomorrow. The area where the boatlift operates is still under water. Here's one of the boatyard guys in the covered dock area clowning with me - but in all seriousness, note that you can't see the dock he's walking on. Saw Jim (Frosty) and we were talking about how we could all probably get out of here without worrying about staying in the channel LOL but heck, who wants to go fight all those waves out there. Besides with our luck we’d probably hit somebodies pier just below the surface of the water. I considered taking a shower but while I was in the womens room the lights went out then back on. Maybe I’ll wait until later.
The boatyard and marina did a terrific job of handling all the boat lines, etc. through this mess, to prevent damage to the boats and docks (well most of the dock area – some are floating) with all the storm and tidal surge.
So far we haven’t been anywhere but here for a month and it’s been interesting. Once we got here, we had to return home to pick up our forgotten instruments, we had to do unforseen repairs to the boat, I got to become a village witch (quite successful at that), Hurricane Ida said hello and decided to become reactivated over us colliding with a NorEasterly, and held on top of us by a high pressure system moving in from the Great Lakes, and we encountered record high tides and floods with 50-60 knot winds. Check out the wind map again to the left for today. The purple areas are 50-60 knots.Score one point for our first month of our second season out. Now if we could just get off land and into the water without sinking. I struggle to say that “we’re scheduled for launch tomorrow”. Every time I say this or write it on my calendar, I have to scribble it back off. Tomorrows another day.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment