I'm back at the Gibson Island Boat Yard now. I got here about 1:00 this afternoon, got tied up and started cleaning up the boat. I expect to be here about a month while I redo the bottom paint and a few other things.

Yesterday was another light wind day although I did get enough wind in the afternoon to motorsail without needing too much power from the engine. I anchored at the north end of Poplar Island in Eastern Bay. I was planning on going a few miles further to the southeast side of Kent Island. The wind had shifted to the SE so I thought the Poplar Island spot would be better. Poplar Island is a three mile long island that is being built with the spoils from the constant dredging in Baltimore Harbor. I thought it was going to be a residential development but it is actually going to be a game preserve. It wasn't a bad place to anchor except for the flys. I had been having a problem with flys ever since I left the ICW. They look like the normal old house flys but they bite! Every time I would try to do something that required me to be still for a minute or two, like checking the route on the computer, they would attack. This morning, I had what looked like thousands of them on board along with about a million that looked about the same but were about 1/5 as big. I had not seen that many flies anywhere before. I was killing them all day and really hope it rains tonight since the deck is not too pleasant right now. There are dead flies everywhere. Once I got to the boatyard, most of them seemed to leave and I only see one now and then.

A really severe thunderstorm came through right after dark last night. The worst of it went north on me but there was still a lot of lightning close by. I put the PC and one GPS in the microwave to protect them and unplugged the primary GPS. Everything seemed OK this morning but after I got going this morning I found that the autopilot and depth sounder weren't working. They are on the same circuit breaker as the GPS which was still working so I thought they may have gotten hit by lightning. The radios and everything else was OK. There wasn't much I could do about it so I kept going and hand steering. After about an hour, they started working again. There must be a bad connection in the power supply for them.

June 18, 2006

Still here at the boatyard. We pulled the boat out last Tue and scraped and pressure washed the bottom. Then it was blocked up in the yard and I got to work. I sanded the bottom, put four coats of epoxy barrier coat on the spots where the paint had pulled away from the steel and put on two coats of Pettit Trinidad SR antifouling paint. The antifouling paint is about 80% copper oxide so it is really heavy. I had sore shoulders for a few days. This is supposed to be the best in bottom paints so hopefully I won't have the barnacles I picked up in Luperon. Hopefully I can get two years out of it since redoing the bottom is not fun. Along with the bottom paint, I put on a stern light (Apparently it never had one.), cleaned the topsides to get rid of the waterline stains, touched up a few spots where there was some rust coming through, cleaned the inside, rebedded the transom exhaust flange, rebedded the swim ladder bracket and relaxed in my spare time. I'm on the schedule to go back into the water today. That is a Baba 40 in the shrink wrap behind Bella Vita.

I still have a few things to do, there's always stuff to do, and then I may go out for a while in the Chesapeake. The inner harbor in Baltimore looks interesting and is close by. Also, I still haven't seen much of the Eastern shore. A friend is coming July 6 to sail to Maine with me so I'll probably be back here to meet up. That should be an interseting trip. We'll go up the Chesapeak, through the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal and downthe Delaware Bay. Depending on the weather and schedule restraints, we may go through New York City and Long Island Sound or if the weather cooperates, we can go offshore direct from the mouth of Delaware Bay around Nantucket Island and Cape Cod to Portland. The combination of large tides, over ten feet, with the resulting tidal currents and the fog they seem to get nearly every day, should make this an interesting trip.