Saturday, May 31, 2008

The new dingy

the hook got the port side pointed back 'fender'

What is that sound??? sssssssssss


Yesterday morning we went fishing in our 11ft dingy. Its a top of the line inflatable. Hard bottom
new this year. After prepping for the trip with cold tea and crackers, bla bla bla,

The first 30 minutes we spent fishing off the point of the 'fort' where our friend and apt fisherman Vic told us we would have good luck. This is within eyesight of Paris Island, the Naval Hospital just under the new (relatively) bridge that goes to Lady's Island. Shrimp boats, sail boats, fishing boats, tugs and even a couple kyacking! The kyackers looked tired by the way. She looked pissed actually....annnnyyyway........

We saw a school of dolphins cavorting and feeding and I tried to get video with my cell phone but I have the WORST timing! Anyway, I got a strike and it was big. So big I started laughing uncontrollably with visions of dinner for 8 for a week---Vic had caught a record winning black drum last year at this VERY spot!!!!! I was ready to get the Fry Daddy out---------the rod tip was bent over almost touching the water and I was close to handing the damn thing to Barry, but at the last minute a huge skate (ray) surfaced.

DRATS! KRIKEY MATES! as Stever Irwin used to say-----Not a good thing to have to deal with out in the river in a dingy....anyway, as I was reeeeeeeeling this thing in laughing all the way like an idiot, and the damn ray went under the boat dragging the second hook into the side of the back panel of the dingy........then a sickening sssssssssss sound and I said 'what the hell is that?' but I knew. Barry cut the line with one hand and started the outboard with the other (fat lot of good I am!) and we headed back to the marina and our boat as fast as we could. The dingy's have compartments so if the worst happens the air only goes out in the punctured section. Just for spite we fished the rest of the day from our dock next to the boat and had a shrimp basket for dinner! Well at least I didn't have to drag the Fry Daddy out!

Today has been nice. Barry played golf at Paris Island and got a VIP tour from the Pres. of the chamber here (his boat is next to ours) and I drove an hour to Linens and Things and Marshall's. Some things never change!!!

ps..the picture is of the cool boat warming gift from my friends Nancy and Ruth Ann. The marina gardens are full of gardenias blooming right now.

Cats!


The camera loves this cat! We thought we lost her day before yesterday ----again, but she finds places on this boat we can not believe! She sleeps all day and walks on my face at night. We are going to miss her when Lindsay takes her to dry land.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Barry's been workin hard!


Therapy with the dawgs diving to clean the boat bottom--and making pantry space

Poor thing yesterday and to stick his head in the head to fix a leaky seal. I did not get a pix of that tho wish I would have. The picture to the left is of Hamish telling how hard
it is being a Salty Sea Dawg!

I found the guy on
the left walking down
the dock this afternoon
Its some kind of big
crane I have not seen
before. We have a few
pigeons and some Marsh Hens
but I have not seen one of these
so close. He walked up and down the docks
looking for lunch in the waters which are now teeming with baby fish. If he comes back Ill try to get a closer picture of him. He was huge! I have named him Frasier Crane.
Little Miss Alex lives here at our marina with her cute family. She took care of our cat Gypsy one day for us during the move here. All the dogs and cats absolutely LOVE Alex. The first time Hamish saw her she was being pulled in a wagon up at the marina store and he climbed in with her! Gypsy just about THROWS herself at Alex when she comes to visit. What a cutie eh> She lives onboard full time and her momma home schools her. She goes to brownies and dance class and plays with Ms Elizabeth when her family is here on weekends. Do you know how hard it is for me to not get down on the ground and draw with chalk on the docks with them? Well its not so hard getting down to play its getting back up!!! Geeeesh Im old.

busiest I think I have ever been


The finished product with striped awning down. The awning rolls up out of the way and of course matches the cushions in the cockpit! Its amazing how much difference this makes when the sun is beating down....and there is a matching one on the other side for morning sun. The bottom is attached along the lifelines so the breeze can get in and we can also shut it all up on cold days and the cockpit turns into a sunroom! No cold days for a while now----tho this spring has been absolutely delightful!

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Bad Girls Tour

Ran across this picture of my foxhunting buddies from the 2nd Bad Girls Tour. Wow. I still have the T-shirt tho Im not sure where my hat is? That is my old QH 'Mister" in the middle window
I think! What a horse!!!

Diving for the inedible


welll the cockpit enclosure is 99% finished. Oh JOY to be sure. Its a whole nuther room for us and where we spend most mornings and evenings and relaxing in between.

Our cat Gypsy has discovered it and Im nervous still but today she gets the harness on and if she is up with us she is going to be hooked on to her very own life line!
No chances. Lindsay will take her when she gets settled in at Charlotte which I hope is soon because if Barry gets this job in Jacksonville, its going to mean we sail there around the 15th of June.

I have such mixed emotions about Jax., but half are good and Im excited because its such a great city and half of me wants to stay here for a while. We go next week to check it out and Ill let my instinct rule. Barry feels the same way. We took his hat out of the ring for the Ft Lauderdale job because its just too far away from kids and family.

My dad came out of his open heart surgery well and was sitting up in the chair yesterday morning when I went to see him---24 hours later! imagine that! He ate stew and they had him walk several times. Amazing. Im so relieved he is well and that he will be feeling so much better soon and enjoying his birds and his dogs and cat. Mom is not looking forward to the recovery
at home but I think he will be a good patient for her. She is so relieved too.

Today Barry is going to dive on the boat using our new Hooka diving system. We have critters growing in places on the boat bottom that need to move along! they are clogging the drainage system and I cants use our galley sink! We are going to a friends boat for a boiled coastal dinner this afternoon=====muscles and clams and shrimp and sausage corn and the likes.

Too bad we can eat whatever it is that is growing on the bottom of our boat! It looks like brains and barnacles and things from another planet.

Well off to finish the coffee and get this diving thing going while the water is calm.

love
Sam

Falcon/ Lynn and Bill's new boat

Posted May4th

Yesterday was non-stop with the exception of our morning coffee. The weather was perfect- Barry saw some dolphins I guess a whole
pod while I was doing something else, ah well.

Our friends Bill and Lynn have been for a week getting their 44 ft. 1987 Marine Trawler up here from the other side of Florida. They hired a husband
and wife team of Captians to bring it through the ditch in Fla which comes out about at Marathon. Bill and Lynn met them in Stuart and the four of
them completed the trip of 4 days. They anchored out at night and cooked and had a great time, then tooted up the ICW until they finally reached
Port Royal. We had been monitoring the VHF below and took the hand held out with us to fish in anticipation of watching them come in.

The actually chose a rough time as there were lots of boats--big ones wanting to fuel up and take fresh water as well as two speed boats with 5 drinking
guys in each burping and ooozing testosterone. So Donna the dock master told Bill via VHF to pop a few wheelies for us out in the river and hold off till they could
get some boats re-fueled. Bill and Lynn need to refuel as well. I stood by the pump later while they filled their 1500 gal tanks---cha ching cha-ching! Glad we are in a sailboat
tho we do have a 75HP deisel engine, we also have a jib a main and mizzen sail and are adding a stay sail.

by the was, Barry and I had made score cards and when Bill did such a good job of pulling into the fuel dock we held them up. a 10 and a 9.5.

I digress----so Bill and Lynn and waving madly to us from out in the river waiting their turn. All is swell. Bill at the helm pulls on to the face dock to refuel and we ooo and ahhhh over this big beautiful honker of a boat.
Trawlers are cool. Lots of space but no sails! Ill try to attach a picture for you. Anyway all goes well but the tide is coming in STRONGLY with a hefty wind from the south pushing the tide and currents in enough
to cause little white caps and put snarles in the ends of my hair( no hat)

Now its time to pull away from the fuel dock and at this point Im thinking, I have SEEN a lot of good captains try to pull into a slip inside the marina in these conditions and in my inexperienced mind Im thinking if Im Bill I thinking lets wait an hour till slack tide.

I mean we have all these charts and graphs and we KNOW. But in the quest for the almighty fuel dollar the dock master told bill it would be alright and after all he did have Captains Wendy and Calvin to help.

Well, long story short 20 minutes later their boat had been carried broadside by above mentioned current scraping the bow of several boats and pushing it hard against the boats and docks. It missed ours by a few feet but only because the tide and wind were in our favor, I stood on the stern of our boat bravely with every intention of pushing this 35000 lb boat off of ours if I had to. 5 minutes later I counted at least 15 full grown men trying to tdo the same as Falcon was dashed into the boats along the floating docks. The sound was horrible and I felt so badly for Bill and Lynn. Lots of bad sounds but little damage after all is said and done.

Everyone scrambled for extra bumpers and people from all over the marina came to help. Well most stood around but a few brave souls took comand and this boat had to be moved to get that boat and for an hour they did chess moves with boats against mother nature. Finally one brave tow boat captain stepped in and took charge and in 10 mintues all was well. They pulled Falcon into a temporary slip and this morning during slack tide Bill and our friend Gene moved Falcon to the slip catty corner from us along the long side of the dock. It was a thing of beauty actually.

Really only one boat had any kind of damage and that is why we have insurance. It was SO exciting. I met a few new people and comforted our friends who had not dreamed their much anticipated homecoming would be so LOUD!

I made chicken and dumplings for Bill, Lynn, Captains Wendy and Calvin on our boat and we had a great time reliving it and placing blame. I love my Italian stainless pressure cooker. In 30 minutes dinner was done- five minutes to steam the dumplings and we were eating fab dinner.

off to the laundry mat now and Lowes.

Love sami
S/V Ever After

Heather and Sami fishing last summer while Steve took this pic from our mast!

Cool pictures eh?
steve had climed the mast about 3/4ths of the
way up to help with the new main sail mast
cover. Steve we still have two pkg's of Panko

Come make more kick ass tempura shrimp!!

Earlier this spring. Sami at the bow.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Our friiend Bill and Hamish


Gypsy guarding the companionway.Bridge at sunset


Day Two May 2nd


Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 1:30 PM
Subject: Friday Day two

Ok this is going to be pretty boring until we actually SAIL somewhere but here goes:

Slept till 8.
Barry walked the dogs while I made coffee.

Sat in the cockpit with our coffee for about an hour.

The cruisers are coming back north from Florida in a steady stream. Sail boats,
Trawlers, bit and small but most pretty big nice boats. They come to the dock and refuel, refill
water tanks, maybe take the marina car to the groceries store and see Beaufort.

They get burgers at the Back Yard Grill up at the marina and have a nice long hot shower. Most of these
boats are tricked out for deep water cruising. Like our boat. Mostly couples a few years older
than us but sometimes guys by themselves and once a 60 year old woman single handed into a slip
with a brand new 42ft Catalina and she had just learned how to sail 6 months before! She looked like she had docked a thousand times
in her life and this marina is tricky to dock at- very strong currents and wind sometimes. 6-9 ft tides.

No baby dolphins today. Maybe the mommas have taken them back out further into the ocean now. They
will be back.

Today we are just continuing the organization part of living on a boat. Barry replaced our ugly tacky white plastic
fans with pretty teak fans in the galley and master suite aft. I actually put some makeup on today to go to Publix.

Yesterday we watched a charter boat come in with lots of fish and they stood and cleaned them for hours. Barry caught one
whiting big enough for us to share----for dinner right from the dock. I pan fried it and it was fab!

Maybe we will have enough in our crab trap to have a fresh blue crab dinner tonight. With an Irish Car Bomb----Im getting quite fond of Guiness
and have some Baileys. Maybe Ill have two. Im not DRIVIN' anywhere ;)

Love
Sam
ps attached is a picture of the process of us getting a new cockpit enclosure. Its not done yet. Grrrrrrrrrrr

First Full Day


Thursday morning.
First full day of non-employment (for me anyway)

Woke up at 7am, smiled to myself and the boat gently rocked me back to sleep.

slept till 8:45.
Barry walked the dogs while I made coffee.

We sat in the cockpit till just a few minutes ago watching the river and life go by.
No momma and baby dolphins this morning but the weather is so unbelievable
today and supposed to stay that way.


Barry is cleaning out the aft lazaret, so we can re-arrange stuff. We bought (online) state of the art
scuba equipment and it will get stored there. We will use it for scuba and cleaning the bottom of the boat which
needs to be done once a month in these waters. We were paying someone $100/month to do it, so this equipment
will pay for itself in a year plus no tanks to fill and schlep around.

I have an article coming out in Living Aboard magazine in the May issue and she has asked me to write another on our cockpit enclosure re-do.

He is going to Lowes and West Marine and Im going to organize stuff below.

The dawgs are happy campers and Gypsy has been her relaxed cat-self thru 3 different motel rooms, car rides in the carrier, and seems to really like the boat. She is one cooooool cat! Even the one plant I brought along (Aunt Carolyn sent me a mimosa
tree from the farm in Oklahoma a year before she passed) seems to love the boat. Its going to be an Oklahoma Bonsai Mimosa Tree.

Im going to try to give an update every few days to cut down on phone minutes, so unless you
have Verizon lets talk via e-mail. We check this address quite often and this will be our primary form of communication.

We wont go sailing for a few months.

I am attaching a picture of our new pantry which hides behind the settee.

Love Sami