2024 December: Windy days in Marathon

 4 December 2024 - Wednesday

no travel

Having spent hours cleaning the nooks and crannies of the salon and pilot house, I was wiped out today. I had hoped to tackle our stateroom today, but Clark had other ideas on how I should spend my time. Given my state of physical exhaustion I did not argue overly much. 

He said "we" had to do Christmas cards as he saw one had arrived at our mail service, and it reminded him of the job to be done. Unfortunately, when he says "we", it means he applies address stickers to envelopes while I figure out what picture(s) to use and what words to put in our year end summary of events. Putting that together took the better part of the morning. Now he can have the job of stamping envelopes and mailing them out. Christmas cards were not on his to-do list, but they are now.

While I was working on the card, we had a visitor. Annette from Bagus 2 stopped in to say hello. We spent some time catching up. As she left she told me she brought some jigsaw puzzles with her to work on. We spent fun time on that activity together last season.

When we arrived at the marina on Sunday, we had about 17 knot winds. Over the last few days, the northern winds have approached 30 knots. I bundled up (that north wind is biting), went for a walk, and took some pictures around the marina. 

Palm trees fronds pushed by northerly winds

It doesn't look like a lot of action in the picture below, but it is amazing how much rocking the boats do as the waves roll in. Those at the northern-most end of the dock shield those of us a bit further in from the worst impacts of the waves. Fortunately, we have a nice big boat right next to us taking the action first!

Waves crashing on the jetty
by our dock

We have gotten "wimpy" in our old age. At 65 degrees with a north wind, we feel the cold. Still it is a lot better than the weather in New York state.

Brrrr ... Grandkids enjoying snow in 
upstate NY for Thanksgiving

Since taking a photography class at the library, I like to try out some shots that I would not normally have taken. I walked over to the tower at the end of the dock to capture pictures through, and of, the metal, circular stairs there.

Boats through the bars

Round-and-round to the top

Clark spent his afternoon checking another item off his long to-do list. He decided to reverse the anchor line that got damaged near Brunswick, Georgia on our way south. He said that this is the first time he has had to reverse a line so soon after installing one. The line was initially installed in 2023 I believe.

Whether to use all chain or partial chain with line is a decision closely resembling choosing a religion. Folks seem to be in one camp or the other and not easily swayed to make a change. Clark likes the combo solution. I wonder how our situation would have worked out had we had all chain. Would we have had no problem at all or would the prop have been damaged instead of the line? 

Anyway, to reverse the line Clark had to disconnect the 3-strand line spliced onto the anchor chain. As he prepared to work on the line, I could hear him walking the decks dragging the chain up from the locker to get to the place where the chain and line were connected. From inside the boat, the noise sounded to me like a ghost scene from "A Christmas Carol"! 

First, Clark disconnected the line from the chain and then used a heat tool to cut off the unraveled, previously spliced section of line. The heat tool cut through the line and sealed the ends of the line at the same time. This end now becomes the "bitter end" of the anchor line. 

Heat tool "surgery" on the line

Next, Clark spliced the reversed line to the chain. Normally, we have to watch a couple of times as a new splice feeds through the windlass until it stretches and "thins out" a bit. Since I man the windlass on anchor deployment, I watch and just give it a shove if it gets stuck along the way.

New splice!

Since we like to know how much line we are putting out, we have the line marked every 25 feet. By reversing the line, those markings are no longer in the right place, so Clark pulled out a permanent marker to mark what used to be the tail end of the line. Once the line was marked, he tied off the end in the locker and fed in the line ready to be deployed next time we go out to anchor.

Over the summer, Clark got rid of our satellite TV system on the boat. It failed to work more than it ever worked for us and cost a monthly fee to add to our complaints of the system. As we travel down the coast, we scan the airwaves for OTA (over-the-air) channels. Sometimes we hit gold and have a lot of choices. Sometimes, not so much. 

In Marathon, before Hurricane Irma hit, we could find two Spanish stations, which did us no good whatsoever. Now, a scan comes up with exactly zero channels! We prefer CBS programming, so as a backup, we subscribe to Paramount Plus to watch our favorite shows. Wednesday night on CBS is reality TV - Survivor and Summit.

So, after dinner with, in our opinion, nothing good on TV to watch, we each did our own thing. Clark received mail from St. Brendan's mail service today, so he had paperwork to catch up on. I decided to watch one of "my" movies. I like action, adventure flicks. Clark is more of a Romcom type. I brought some DVDs on the trip including 3 movies in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. I watched the "Curse of the Black Pearl" tonight. I first saw it years ago and loved the comedy / action. I was definitely not disappointed this time either. Many scenes had me laughing out loud! Now I have parts 2 and 3 to look forward to!

I did sneak out at some point and got a sunset picture. Clark could not find his sunglasses, and I wanted to be sure he had not left them on deck somewhere. While I was checking for sunglasses, I snapped the shot below. I found his sunglasses in the pilot house!