Bob and Marilyns Cruising Blog: A STRANGE WINTER BUT AFTER A LONG WAIT THE WEATHER IS MUCH BETTER

I know, I know, I’ve been really bad about posting to the blog, but like I said, it’s been a strange winter. Rather than heading for Florida in early November like we'd hoped, I ended up making a short visit to the hospital and Marilyn thought she better wait for me before she left too. Ultimately it wasn’t anything serious. Seems I had a heart valve that got a little out of wack, but was taken care of with medication. So now I’ve joined the club of others taking aspirin and Lipitor. The worst part of the whole thing was that it set our schedule back by about 2 1/2 weeks. That meant we had to change a lot of reservations and find somewhere else to stay while we worked on the boat. Things got worked out and we settled in to work on things and get it ready to go back into the water. As we worked on things, it took much, much longer to deal with the engine repair that I had planned. After completing a few projects, it became clear that it didn’t make sense to go anyplace with the boat if we planned to go home for the holidays, so we left it on the ground and headed for cold, cold North Dakota.

North Dakota seemed colder than normal this year, but regardless, we had a wonderful Christmas with daughter Andrea and grandson Kyle. Unfortunately, son Tom couldn’t be there, but, Oh yes, he did get to spend some time with us over the Thanksgiving holiday and we had fun in the warm weather with him. We spent some time with friends skiing in Colorado, before preparing to head back south.

On January 29th we headed back south to two straight days of rain. But, at least it was rain and not snow. One of the final couple of things that we need to do before putting the boat back in the water is to fix the port centerboard. In order to do that we needed to have the boat hang on the lift for awhile before it goes into the water. The best option was to have it hang for a week-end when workers are not at the boat yard. Unfortunately, there was a scheduling conflict which has postponed our lift by another week. We hope to get the lift and fix the centerboard next week-end, February 8th and 9th. Then finally, we should be able to drop her in the water. As soon as we get her wet, I hope I have some more interesting narrative to share.