Wednesday 1/31/2018
No boat travel.
When we retired to bed last night around midnight, the wind was howling and the boat was doing the rock and roll. No sooner did we turn out the lights than we started to hear erratic thumping sounds coming from the bow of the boat. I could tell this would be an impossible-to-sleep situation.
I laid awake listening to thump, thump, thump, pause, thump, thump, longer pause, ... "Clark", I said, "I can't sleep through that noise." He just rolled over and started to go to sleep. "Clark! Can you sleep with that noise?"
"I was just about asleep", he grumbled. "Well, I can't sleep with that going on.", I replied, "I think it is the lines wrapped around the rails falling back into place when the wind stops."
"It's windy and cold out there!" he said. "Are you going to go out to move the lines?"
"I'm not going out there!" I retorted.
After some additional prodding and refusing to let him sleep if I couldn't, Clark eventually got up to move the lines. When he came back in, I said, "That did not fix the problem. I still hear the thumping!" He replied, "The wind is so loud out there I can't hear anything."
I sent him out again to try moving the PVC pipe in the anchor locker as that seemed the next likely culprit. When he came back in, I said, "That still didn't fix it!"
He climbed back into bed and settled in to listen to thump, thump, pause, etc. ... It would be a very long night tonight. Suddenly he said, "I think that noise is the anchor chain in the anchor locker." One more time he went out to see if he could address the situation with a positive result.
While he was out there, I heard all sorts of racket directly in front of the bed since the anchor chain locker sits in that space on the boat, i.e. directly in front of our bed. Rattle, rattle, crash, bang, ... When Clark came back to bed this time, I said, "Eureka! That solved the problem! No more noise!" He said that he had draped some of the chain over the partition so it would not swing back and forth. Hurrah! We had no more odd noises for the rest of the night.
I told him he was my hero, and he put his cold feet on my legs to warm them. That seemed only fair.
Last night as Clark and I were preparing to go to bed, he read my blog and pointed out that if I didn't get up at some ludicrous hour in the morning I would miss the whole, blood moon / eclipse / blue moon thing as the full moon would occur in the morning and not in the evening on 1/31 as I thought. When I read my Facebook updates this morning, I found another boater here at Faro Blanco did get up early and took a picture of the moon, so through him, I got to have a look.
Clark did a good job gluing our cocktail table back together yesterday. Convinced it would hold, we decided we could put it back in place on the chair this morning. It looks the same as before its tragic accident.
Afterwards, he decided to look at a potential exhaust leak in the engine room. He took a clamp off, did some poking around, and decided that the marks he sees may be from a prior problem that has been repaired. He decided to put things back together as is for now. What he wants to do is paint the engine in the discolored spot to see if it stays clean afterward. Unfortunately, we think we left all our engine paint in the house in Rumson, so that won't be happening for a while.
I hoped to get to the grocery store today, but the day ended up flying by with Clark talking on the phone to some company or another and then him taking some measurements, etc. etc. etc. Next thing we know it is around 3:00 and we are still on the boat. I told him I needed to get off the boat as I was starting to have cabin fever from spending too much time in the boat's cabin.
Finally, we got our bikes out ready to ride to a few stores, but Clark decided to stop by the lighthouse first to see if we could collect the package that Amazon said had been delivered. Since we were heading out that way, Clark said he wanted to swing by to talk to Mitch on Fat-n-Sassy before we went on our bike trip.
While talking to Mitch, it came out in conversation that we planned to bike to the stores. He kindly offered us the use of his car. Clark declined and I accepted the offer. We took the keys from Mitch with plans to head off shopping.
Meanwhile, as we talked to Mitch, drama was acting out on the docks near Mitch's boat. A gentleman here who is boating on his own, i.e. traveling no crew, fell last night and twice this morning. I think the ambulance that appeared last night came because this same man had fallen. Last night, he declined a trip to the hospital, so they left without him.
The first time he fell this morning, he fell off the dock into the water. Another boater, the one beside Mitch's boat, saw it happen and went into the water and pulled him out. Then this afternoon, just before we walked over to Mitch's boat, the man fell on the bow of his boat and could not get up. The dock hands called EMS. Fortunately a doctor from another boat sat with the man until the EMS arrived.
For a moment there was a bit of panic as no one knew the whereabouts of the man's dog. It turned out the dog, Sophie, was at the groomers at the time of the incident. One of the dock hands that work here said she would take care of the dog.
Just as we left Mitch's boat to go find the car (Mitch and his dog Tyson / DumDum came with us), the ambulance appeared. Clark ran over to tell them which dock to go to. Then Mitch decided he better go back with the EMS guys to point out the specific boat. Clark and I continued on to get the car and head out.
The later the time got, the happier I was that we had a car and not just bikes. Clark planned to go all the way to the far end of Marathon to an auto parts store. I needed to stop at the post office and Publix, and I wanted to stop at Beall's to look at swim attire. Ultimately, we managed to get to all of these plus the Specialty Hardware store along the way.
We returned to Faro Blanco around 5:30. On bicycle, we would not have been able to cover all that territory that late in the day. Clark dropped me and our purchases off at the boat and took off to return the keys to Mitch. He was gone so long I thought he had found folks at docktails and was busy chatting.
Later, when I walked down the dock to dispose of our recycle garbage, I saw all the boaters on their boats. It was clear to me that no one was at docktails. I fully suspect that it was cancelled again tonight due to the chill and the wind.
Okay, so where is Clark if not at docktails? I decided I better go look for him.
I found him still on Mitch's boat with his head in an electrical cabinet tracing wires. Mitch invited me on board. Sighing, I took him up on the offer. This did not look good for an early dinner. While Clark followed the pink wire (I didn't know wires came in pink), I played with the dog Tyson aka DumDum. After about ten minutes of that, Jen returned to the boat, so the two of us took DumDum for a walk.
At 7:30, Clark finally said that he was done. He had traced the wire and knew what was what with the flickering lights in the pilot house. He announced that we could go back to the boat. "Yay!", I thought to myself, "Now I get to make dinner! How great is that!" With no plans, I wondered what exactly we would be eating. Fortunately when I opened the fridge, I found leftover pasta and that became the foundation for tonight's fare.
After dinner Clark left to take a shower via a stop off at Mitch's boat to drop off a wiring diagram he had made from his work tracing Mitch's wires. I lost track of how long he was gone as I worked on today's blog entry.
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