January 7, 2009.

Its been a few days of routine maintenance for us among other things.

The other day Jay asked if I would mind being hauled to the top of his mast to reinstall his anemometer (wind speed thingy). Its kinda funny but when I was a kid I hated heights. I worked as a carpenter for a few years and my feet used to ache when I got down off a roof. My feet actually had cramps from my toes trying to dig through my boots in an effort to get a better grip on the roof.

Anyway, now it doesn’t bother me anymore so up I went. The reinstallation was straight forward and was over quickly so I used the opportunity to take some pictures of the anchorage from the top of the mast.
As you can see from the photos most of the boats really rely on solar power to keep things running.

Today while Christy went to shore and did laundry I went about the business of changing fluids. I changed the engine oil, the transmission fluid and the oil in the generator. After I was done I picked Christy and the clean laundry up. After a quick lunch we were going to hop on the bus to take care of a quick errand but something came up.

The weather. Luckily we checked the weather radar before we left the boat. There was a really nasty line squall headed our way. It looked ominous on the radar and the text forecast was babbling on about possible 50 knot winds. Since we’re rafted up to two other boats on a single mooring we thought that we should stick around just to make sure things went okay.

When the wind first hit the boats were all facing southwest. In an instant we were all facing northwest. The initial gusts were so violent that all three boats heeled so far to port that our fenders popped out from between the boats. I had just enough time to reset all the fenders before the rain came.






The wind and rain only lasted a half hour or so and after that the sun popped back out and things went back to normal. We did see a gust of 45 knots but for the most part the wind was between 20 to 25 knots so all in all it wasn’t so bad.