The Laziest of Days
Thursday 1st April 2021
We were just about to go to bed last night when a squall came through as part of the cold front and it started blowing 30 knots. We could see lightening in the distance but nothing close by. Normally the boat will turn into the wind but the current in this anchorage is so strong that it tends to define the direction the boat is pointing. The winds were coming from the side of the boat and causing it to heel over quite dramatically which is an eerie sensation. However, the GPS told us the boat wasn’t going anywhere and I was so tired that I was asleep within minutes and didn’t wake again all night. By the time I got up Gloria already had the coffee made (what a wonderful wife!) and I stumbled out of bed for some hot liquid revival. The remains of the clouds from cold front blew through by mid-morning and we were left with a bright but cold and windy day. We opted just to hang out and enjoy being lazy on the boat.
Gloria spent much of the day sewing as she starts on a new quilting project. I turned my attention to backing up the external hard-drives that I use to store my photos on. When we moved on board in August of last year I started a new 2TB external drive (MHB Photos 2) and have updated a back-up copy on a separate hard drive every couple of months. These drives are now full, almost entirely with photographs. The large amount of data is partly because that I’m taking a lot of photographs but there are some additional reasons. My Nikon D850 takes much larger raw files than my previous D700 (~ 4 x bigger) and shooting sets of images for “focus stacking” has increased the number of shots I take. Whereas I might previously have taken a couple of photos of a subject where depth of field was an issue, I now sometimes take a set of 20 or more of that same subject and then combine them later using the computer. Of course data storage is relatively cheap and I am hopeless at throwing anything away. It took me several hours to complete the back-up process and then I switched over to new external hard drives only to realize that they were formatted for Windows rather than a Mac. Fortunately the customer support representative at WD was able to walk me through reformatting the drives and I’m now up and running.
We also spent a couple of hours planning our trip through Georgia. On the way south we skipped most of Georgia, sailing overnight from Beaufort, SC to St Mary’s, GA. We briefly visited this area before moving on to Florida. As we head north we plan to spend two weeks working our way through the inland waters exploring this wild and remote area. Its challenging because there are many sections that are quite shallow and there is not the funding to support adequate dredging of the ICW. However, the tides are large (5-7ft) and so by timing your passage through specific sections with the high tide we should be able to make our way safely. Those big tides also bring strong currents in the creeks and estuaries so a lot of care is needed. We now have a broad plan and a set of anchorages that we hope to visit.
Mike
30 43.037 N, 81 33.099 W
No comments:
Post a Comment