Yesterday was a chilly, dreary mess with rain predicted all day. While Jack scrubbed the bird droppings off the boat I baked a couple of loaves of bread to warm the place up. The rain never came, and in retrospect we probably could have knocked 20-30 miles off in the afternoon, but sometimes you just have to veg out for a while. I took advantage of a pretty good wifi connection to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes, family history research, and made some serious headway on a friend’s paternal line.
Last night we kept hearing sounds we recognize as 15-20 kt winds, but when we looked at the wind instrument it registered only 2-3 kts. Hmmmm. That’s obviously wrong and we’re going to have to look into it. We got spun around every couple of hours by the wind and current and by morning our track at anchor looked like this:
Looks like we had too much chain out. Our chart and instruments said we were anchoring in 18 feet but once the hook settled in and the tide went out it was really only 10 feet so we swung quite a bit. Luckily we had plenty of room.
This morning we planned for an early getaway from Nowheresville but the currents were against us until after 8am so we had another cup of coffee and a more leisurely start. There’s a heavy dew hanging in the air and the rain that didn’t come yesterday looks threatening today.
I can’t believe how much cold and bleak weather we’ve had these past three months. In the Hudson River, in Annapolis, in Portsmouth and even Charleston there’ve been few sunny days and fewer warm ones. When we lived in a house I loved this kind of weather. I would stand at our kitchen door looking out at the gray sky and dripping rain gutters and feel incredibly lucky that I had a roof over my head and a warm place to sleep, that my family was well fed and safe. There are too many people in the world who don’t have those basic needs and I know that my good fortune is just an accident of birth.
Here on the boat I like it less, but only because this particular boat doesn’t have a diesel cabin heater. The only way we can heat the joint is by running a space heater on a noisy generator. If we were planning to spend more time in temperate climates we’d consider installing a system but they’re expensive and we hadn’t really planned on being north for this long so it’s really our own damn fault for not heading south with the snowbirds.
Besides, we have a roof over our heads and a warm place to sleep. We are well fed and safe, and we have the luxury of being able to move our home to a warmer place. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
