The Good Life continues…my Mom has left and Heather and her two kids have arrived. It is soooo good to see them all again. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed them. The kids are fascinated with life aboard, Cassidy, who will be seven in the fall, is figuring out what tides are all about, why the poles with the dock identifications are shorter sometimes than others and how much of the shoreline is showing every time we go out of the marina. Yesterday morning I took both Cassidy and Elijah ( four) out at low tide and we collected shells and put them in their minnow nets, Elijah was absolutely enthralled with all the tiny crabs that he could find hiding under rocks and crawling around.
After lunch Heather and I and the kids went to a fresh water beach and swam and played in the sun and sand all afternoon. It was about 27 degrees with not a cloud in the sky and a slight breeze off the water to keep us from baking. Grandpa had to stay on the boat because a plumber was supposed to come to fix our fresh water pump (he never showed, the part hasn’t arrived yet) that keeps setting off a breaker because a sensor doesn’t work. He is also going to install a new hot water tank, so glory be, I should have really hot water to do dishes and possibly have a shower on board. I just found the shower attachment yesterday!!!! Treasures abound in every nook and cranny and I thought I had found them all!
I have made a one slide Power Point presentation of some pictures that we have and I will try and import it to the blog, if it doesn’t work, I will send it as an attachment to an e-mail and those of you that have Power Point will be able to see some pictures. We don’t have internet hook up on the boat yet, still, (although the electrical guy is coming today) so I have to go into Sidney and sit in a coffee shop and illegally use someone’s unsecured wireless hookup to go online with our laptop. Otherwise I have to send an e-mail to my mother-in-laws computer, that doesn’t have a lot of fancy programs, and then drive for an hour to try and figure out how to get pictures from my e-mail onto the blog site. I know you guys don’t care about all that stuff but it is a frustration for me!!
Heather and the grandkids are here for 10 days and supposedly the new engine should be here sometime this week so we may or may not have to find alternate accommodation (a motor home, if one is available, or a cottage on the beach, or a hotel room). All the trades people are so busy they don’t have time to communicate very well so we have no real idea when the engine is supposed to arrive so we can’t book something yet and OH WELL life goes on J. We are planning on going to Vancouver so the kids can experience the Vancouver Aquarium, and hopefully we can co-ordinate the visit so we can see our life raft that is over there to be serviced being repacked. Apparently it is a 2 to 3 hour process, and I am quite interested in seeing what they do.
The summer is quickly slipping away and we haven’t even had a chance to sail the boat, so the possibility of us leaving in the fall is looking a little dim. We did talk to someone in a chandlery and he said people leave in Jan. or Feb. and sail down, it has been done and the weather forecasting is so much better now that you probably could find a good weather window to make the trip to San Francisco. Barry, of course, the eternal pessimist, the cautious safety conscience person that he is, is sure that we won’t leave and we will not be able to leave until next summer. The prospect of living aboard in rainy, dreary, coastal B.C. for a winter does not please me one bit. I think we would both look for some kind of work in the fall if we are unable to get the boat into shape on time to leave in the fall.
