Marsh Harbour and still varnishing ...

I'm getting into the home stretch on renewing Alizee's exterior varnish.  I got the first coat on the caprails yesterday and sanded for the second coat today.  I would have liked to have put down the second coat but rain is predicted for tonight, and I would have hated seeing the whole thing ruined by rain coming too soon, so I've gotten pretty good at patience ... it's perhaps the greatest virtue for a sailor to have.

Meantime, I've read a couple of good books: E. L. Doctorow's The March: A Novel, about Sherman's famous march through Georgia and up through the Carolinas in 1864/65, and although I'm sure I read it some years ago, he's such good writer, I enjoyed it almost as though it were a first read.  I'm now reading Graham Swift's Waterland, a story told through the narration of an English grammar school history teacher.  So far I'm finding it fascinating and absorbing.  On the sailing side of things, I've read John Kretschmer's Flirting with Mermaids, which is a well-told memoir of his life as a delivery captain.  I highly recommend it.  I also read Tom Horton's An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake, which initially was excellent but seemed to lose its punch and holding power toward the end.  But if you're interested in the Chesapeake environment, the lives of watermen and their women in this part of the bay where life has hardly changed in a hundred years, it's well worth looking over.

Saturday night I went to the Jib Room Restaurant in Marsh Harbour Marina for their steak night.  They do a great rib dinner on Wednesday nights, which I've had a couple of times, but I was a little leery about steak.  Au contrair, the steak was the best I've had eating out in years, perfectly medium rare, a crispy well-baked potato, steamed vegies, and a nice salad.  Yum, yum!!

And, I had some good conversations, particularly with three fellows who had just sailed down from Wilmington, North Carolina in their Hinkley 42 center cockpit ketch.  Unlike the mill-pond which Keith, Rob, and I crossed, they had a good and fast ride down in 12-14 foot seas with 15-20 knots of breeze and they made it in three days.  They are hoping to go on down through the Exumas and Turks and Caicos to the Dominican Republic and asked, since one of them has to leave in a week from here, would I like to come along.  I didn't have to think twice about saying no, but it was nice to be asked.  I saw them today and they were trying to fix a major problem ... one of their fuel tanks sprung a leak, and they had to get all the fuel transferred to the other tank and repair the leak.  Oy vey!  That's a problem I surely would hate to have.

Another "cold" front is coming in from the eastern seaboard tonight, so I'm readying myself to spend the night watching the anchor.  So far I've not dragged anchor anywhere, although I did re-anchor the other night because someone else anchored to close to me.  They should have moved but seemed nonchalant about it, so I figured I'd must move, make some hot water with the motor running, and then get a nice shower.  Life is too good here to get upset over small shit.