Almost ready to go

Mike and I have been out in Solomons now for almost a week, taking care of a million details to get the boat ready for our trip down to Savannah. On Wednesday, I picked up Kurt, with the original idea of departing on Thursday, which was yesterday. But we are still here, partly because of the final boat work being done by the Spring Cove Boatyard people but mostly because of the weather, which has sucked. The tail-end of Tropical Storm Lee has been lingering here for the last five days, alternating between light sprinkles and tremendous thunderstorms.

Today is the final day for work on the boat. Don, the boatyard manager, and Chas, his mechanic, are installing some hatch hardware and fine tuning the standing rigging. We were able to get the sails rigged yesterday during a lull in the rain, so we're pretty close to being ready to go.

I wrote the first two paragraphs of this post earlier today. Since then, we have completed a sea trial with Chas, just out into the mouth of the Patuxent River, where it meets up with Chesapeake Bay, to run the new engine through its paces and calibrate the autopilot. Chas also gave us an engine maintenance orientation and showed us how the pump-out for the waste system works.

Now it looks as though we will be ready to set sail at around ten o'clock tomorrow, Saturday. On Don's advice, we will be sailing through the day and overnight to Norfolk, skipping our earlier planned stop in Deltaville. This will help us make up for one of the days we are behind schedule. I hope to meet my old friend Keith and his wife Patti for breakfast there before we push on for the ICW.