We are finally moving forward again. If you keep track of us, and I hope you don’t spend a lot of effort at it, you will remember that we left Harborview on May 1. We spent a week in the boatyard for bottom paint and new lifelines. We spend three weeks after that continuing to work through a lot of junk on the deck, fine-tuning some of Larry’s installations, and cleaning the boat. We spent some time at Rock Creek, made a trip back to Baltimore for groceries and departed again for the Bay.
We have bounced around a lot, and today we are in the marina only a few hundred feet from where we started. It sounds as if we are going nowhere, but in fact, we have made a lot of progress. If you had seen us on May 1 and then looked us over today, even the least nautical person would notice that this boat looks a lot more shipshape. That is the point of it all. Progress every day toward the goal. We are retired, after all, so we don’t have the sense of urgency that drives high-tech projects. We want to go cruising, but we are taking time along the way to enjoy the process.
Today we had the joy of attending worship at Christ Church again, since we are here. After seven Sundays away, it was wonderful to be there. That sanctuary inspires worship and sets us on the right course. It was also great to see our friends. Some thought we had finished our cruising and were returning for good. They could hardly take in the idea that seven weeks were devoted to getting ready and the real trip is still ahead.
We, too, get a little discouraged sometimes, but we will not stop working. It really is amazing the way each new task begins with a new problem. We are back in Harborview now simply because the people who sold us our life raft also sold us a bracket that didn’t fit the raft. Is that not weird? But we have learned that this is boat life. It is just the way it is.
In fact, we don’t have the worst of it, or we haven’t had the worst of it yet. I am reading Joshua Slocum’s book “Sailing Alone Around The World”, and I just read about a day on which he was hit by a huge wave. He noticed the wave building as it roared toward him. He dropped all sail and climbed into the rigging. He left the deck! I could not imagine why, but then the wave hit. He said that for several minutes he could not see the deck. Yet after the wave roared on, the boat shook itself and then continued to sail on. He climbed down out of the rigging to the deck.
So far, we have never had such an experience, and I hope we won’t. Joshua Slocum had no way of predicting weather at all, so he could not have known when storms were building until they were too close for him to run away. We plan to use all the weather information at our disposal to avoid known storms. Most people we know who take advantage of the information manage to avoid the kind of drama Joshua Slocum faced daily.
Tomorrow we will leave Harborview with a plan to continue cruising in the Bay while we store the rest of our gear. We look for that work to be finished within ten days. Please do not count the hours. We aren’t that good with schedules. However, if we are done in ten days, it means we should be headed out of the Bay by July 1. Stay tuned for further developments. The good ship No Boundaries will soon be on the move again.
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