The autumnal equinox

The autumnal equinox

Monday Sept 21, 2020

It’s technically the start of the autumn season but right here it feels like the start of winter.  The north winds have been strong for five days now.  It seems each morning is colder than the last.  When we were in Maine, I was saying that I didn’t have enough warm clothes.  Now, Mike is saying the same.  Maybe this will be the year with no autumn.  Usually we go right from winter to summer with no spring.  Now after one of the hottest, driest summers that anyone can recall, we go straight to winter....

Mike did a number of projects yesterday: Fixed the shower curtain, fixed the broken dorade surround and installed an alternative priming system to the holding tank pump.  Today we got an email about "port closure latches".  So now we have some of those on order.   These gizmos allow you to close the “windows” in the boat securely.  By turning the threaded plastic knob you can tighten the opening window against a gasket.  It’s all well and good until the plastic piece develops cracks.  If it actually fails, you can’t get the window closed tight.  No one wants to have salt water coming into the boat....

My personal accomplishment of the day was to sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan. What a nightmare this has been. It’s a long and complicated story, but basically because of Covid-19 it wasn’t possible to get an in-person appointment at the Department of Social Security and when my on-line attempts to register for Medicare couldn’t be completed I received help from a telephone consultation, which ended up with my account being registered with a temporary Rhode Island address rather than our full-time Massachusetts address. When it came to sign up for the Advantage plan, which is a state specific program, it wouldn’t find my account because of a mismatch of addresses. Today we were able to resolve that and complete the process … except in the confusion I ended up signing up for a different plan than we intended. So now we are stuck with that until the open enrollment period starts next month and we can change it for the following year. Could they make it any more complicated?

Today in addition to some land-based jobs, we took the boat into the dock.  We had three objectives: fill with diesel, pump out the holding tank and fill the water tanks.  The tough aspect in this case was that these activities are on different docks.  So that means coming in to one dock for the pump out and then untying and moving the boat to a second dock for fuel and water.  The stronger the wind (and/or current), the tougher the docking challenge.  The approach to the pump out dock went fine.  Once we had completed that task, we backed off the dock.  That’s an un-docking method that is less familiar to me, but it went just fine.  Thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of traffic going past.  I imagine that most boaters might not be expecting the departure in reverse.  The second docking and undocking, similarly, went well.  The bonus was that we were able to give the topsides a wash down with fresh water.  This well go a long way to removing the salt that accumulates after those “spicy” sails. 

Then we went back up the cove to pick up the mooring once again.  Now we are resting and bracing for the big winds that are forecast for tomorrow that are a result of hurricane Teddy to the East.

Gloria

East Greenwich, RI