Ahhh.
Finally, here we are, drinks in hand, sitting in the cockpit of our
new home. Around us is a
sea of masts; an osprey circles above, and we can look out and
see a swan gliding aptly on the waters of Swan Creek. We can almost
imagine that we're really in the water.
Alas, the water upon which the swan glides is twenty yards from our hull. Calico-soon-to-be-Windom is currently sitting "on the hard" at the marina's boatyard, where she's been since the beginning of November. The water tanks are still filled with preservative, so we have to use the marina bathrooms and cook and wash dishes in our van (which is parked just behind the boat). Getting in and out is accomplished via a rickety wooden ladder which we scarfed from the yard's shop. But! Here we are, in our boat! And it feels absolutely magnificent to be here.
It's hard to express how ebullient I feel right now. Our roadtrip was great fun; we finished it off with a lovely drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, and then visited Harper's Ferry National Historic Site in West Virginia before driving to my parents' house. It was nice to spend some time with my parents, and with my brothers and sister-in-law and 18-month-old niece, too. But we were itching to finish the trip, to get here, where we've been working toward for the past three years, where we've been heading for the past month. Yesterday, when we pulled into the boatyard, I felt like singing. Here we are!
4/9: Last night the wind picked up in the wee hours. The noise of halyards slapping against masts and tarps slapping against hulls woke us. Boatyard cacophony. Of course, our boat was silent and snug, although every so often we felt a shake from the wind -- not the best feeling when you're on stilts, six or so feet off the ground. In the morning, Britt grabbed the ladder and went around to the worst and closest offenders, tying down the noisy bits so we can have a quieter snooze tonight.
It was cold and dark and windy all day, and a few minutes ago, just as we finished our dinner, it started raining. Now we get to find out if we have any leaks.
Two days here, and what do we have to show for it? Hmm. We've picked out a wireless service that willl probably work here, and ordered a phone. We picked out a font for our new boat name, and arranged with the marina for "the guy who does everybody's boat names" to come out and do ours. We met the women who run the marina and the men who run the boatyard; we moved some of our stuff into the boat; we went through the stuff the former owner left on board and decided what to keep and what to throw out. We bought new boat shoes, groceries, and three bottles of wine.
Probably the most fun thing we did was remove the shrinkwrap. We had Windom shrinkwrapped for out-of-the-water winter storage on the advice of the former owner, who had it done each winter. Shrinkwrapping protects a boat's topsides; it also makes it harder to get in and out of (there's a zippered door, but it's pretty awkward because you need to crawl under the wrapping to the companionway entrance), and in addition it looks very silly. Our very first boat project was to attack this stuff with scissors until we had a boat again.
Another project was pumping the bilge, which was full of water. (Please don't ask how a boat that's sitting on solid ground gets water in the bilges.) Then we had to solve the problem of an apparently broken battery charger. Britt crawled around the battery compartment with a voltmeter until he figured out that the charger was working fine, although its indicator lights weren't. We've made a shopping list for the things we'll need to put a new coat of bottom paint on as soon as the rain quits. Our to-do list is still long. But we're working on it.