Planning for Medicare in the time of Covid-19

Planning for Medicare in the time of Covid-19

Saturday August 8^th, 2020

 

Today was very relaxing! It was cloudy and grey this morning so we didn’t feel the need to get going quickly. After a leisurely breakfast the clouds started to break up so we headed to shore and hiked out to the shellfish pond on the west side of the island. We took our binoculars and it turned out to be a really nice walk and we saw lots of birds. One of our goals is to keep a list of how many species of birds we see in one year living aboard. It was about 1.30pm by the time we got back to Cotinga and time for lunch. We then both fell asleep … yikes, I’m turning into my Dad!

 

The latter part of the afternoon was taken up trying to figure out our sailing plans for the next several days. This is a little more stressful than you might imagine because on Tuesday Gloria has a telephone appointment with Social Security to try and sign up for Medicare and we absolutely have to be somewhere with decent cell phone connectivity. This whole process has turned into something of a nightmare. Typically Gloria could create an on-line account with Social Security and the complete everything on the “inter-webs”. However, it turns out she has an inadequate credit history to complete this on-line and so has to do it in person at the Social Security office, which has been closed to in-person appointments since March, which is why after several months of phone calls, she now has a telephone appointment supposedly to set up this account. It’s clear that not everywhere has great cell phone coverage, including Cuttyhunk, which is decidedly marginal. We want to take advantage of the good weather forecast for the next few days to make some headway up to Maine, so we plan to head up Buzzards Bay tomorrow (Sunday) then through the Cape Cod canal on Monday and on up to Duxbury, where we think there should be decent cell phone coverage.

 

We did manage to go swimming from the boat prior to dinner, which was “refreshing”. Overall I would say Cuttyhunk is lovely place to visit. It’s of particular interest to Gloria because her Dad was stationed here in the army during the Second World War as part of the coastal defense and you can still see the pill-box gun emplacements up on the hills.

 

 

Mike

 

N 41 25.525, W 70 55.468

Common Terns - adult with sand eel and juvenile

Cuttyhunk harbor - the shallow area beside the town dock

The shellfish pond on the west side of Cuttyhunk

A gaff rigged sailboat enters the inner harbor - the masts visible behind are in the outer harbor