New Memorial Day Plans

We are changing plans again. We had planned to get away Memorial Day weekend to anchor at Dutch Harbor near Jamestown, RI, but changes to work travel requirements prodded us to rethink this. Norm was already scheduled to be in Pittsburgh the week before the holiday weekend, and now he also needed to be there the week after. We will use this as an opportunity to visit family, by driving to Pittsburgh, spending the holiday weekend at Norm’s mother's, on the way, and then visiting our children and their families in Ohio at the end of the following week.

We took delivery of the dinghy and outboard and have already registered them. The 15 hp outboard is a handful at 113 lbs. We are adding a lifting crane, as using a spare halyard has not worked well for us.  Trying to handle it as we did with our 5-hp Mercury will not work without someone getting hurt or losing the motor. We also had our holding tank system inspected. This is a new requirement in Rhode Island. Linda made good progress scraping the old finish off the teak after we picked up some new blades.

We Are Launched

Last week, Ariel was launched, right on schedule. We spent the weekend and Monday aboard. When getting ready to clean the deck, we discovered a bird's nest built between the anchor rollers. We waited to see if the parents were around, but it soon became apparent that they did not follow Ariel's travels from the boatyard to our slip. If they had been around, we would have left the nest in place, but without the parents, Norm removed the nest and got on with cleaning the winter grime from the deck. Saturday was very nice, so we got a good start getting the boat ready. We were able to get the dodger and bimini on and finish cleaning the cabin areas. We are still moving things around, trying to find the best storage arrangements.

We stayed on Monday to test our internet connections and Norm’s ability to work from the boat. The marina has a wireless system (for a fee), which we subscribed to. Bottom line, he was able to work quite well from the boat. The wireless connection is actually faster than the DSL service we have at home.  We subscribed to a second service for our personal laptop and used Skype for business calls. The work area in the guest cabin is comfortable, quiet, and Norm was not distracted. Linda spent much of the day scraping the finish off the teak caprail.