The week following Independence Day was designated by my company as a vacation time for everyone this year. That did not apply to Vicky which meant that while I was on vacation, Vicky still had to work a lot of nights. My original thought for this time was to do a grand tour of the upper Chesapeake Bay... stopping at various anchorages and maybe even visiting a town or two if we felt safe (for future readers, it's "COVID Summer").
Two things kept that from happening. First, as we approached this week, Vicky's work took an intense turn. Key needs of some important clients required her to have midnight teleconferences and the like, which in turn required that we have a solid internet connection each night. Second, we are in a heat wave with temps in the 90s during the day and evenings quite warm as well with high heat and humidity. Seas The Day has a generator and therefore can run AC at night if we anchored out. But we decided we didn't want to listen to that all night long (especially while trying to communicate with China).
No, it seemed this week would be a week mostly spent at the dock... day trips out sailing but evenings enjoying ourselves onboard but dockside.
On Saturday, my cousin's daughter, Deb, her husband, Nathan, and Marianne and Brian came for their annual sailing excursion. Regular readers (both of you) might recall that their sailing visit last year lead to us getting Seas The Day 425. Originally scheduled for Friday the 3rd (again Deb and Nathan first choose the hottest day of the year - I think that's four years in a row), we bumped them to Saturday due to the heat expected on Friday.
Delaying also meant that Winter's Sailing could finish converting our hatch from the vertical sliding design (which kept failing in such a way that ended up trapping us inside) to a more traditional hatch. It has the added benefit of letting in an more light.
(I added some frosted glass film to the inside for a bit of privacy.)
The sailing excursion with Deb and family went very well. We are both quite serious about socially distancing during this pandemic, so they stayed mostly on the port side and Vicky and I took the starboard side. With Seas The Day having a beam of almost 14 feet, we easily had six feet between us. Together with the breeze from being underway, we both decided to take off the masks for a while. (Yes, we live in weird times when families have to think these things through.)
Brian and Marianne are old salts by this point (I think this is their 4th time sailing with us). My favorite moment of the day was watching Marianne calmly sitting on the pushpit seat reading her My Little Pony book. A lot of people get nervous up there, but she was just as comfortable as she could be. We sailed down to go under the Bay Bridge and back... to settle the controversy of it being one or two bridges (they decided it was two).
After we got back to the dock, Deb and her family said their goodbyes and we went below where Vicky made a wonderful dumpling dinner. The official fireworks for Rock Hall were cancelled... there were some supposed to happen across the bay in Middle River, but I have to confess that with everything going on this year, I didn't feel like celebrating the fourth. We ended up curling up in the salon and watching Hamilton.
Sunday
After waking up on Sunday and spending some time lazing about in bed (she's either working or shopping), we actually headed back home. We originally thought a shipment of Chinese food would be coming so we only packed for one night, but it turned out lines got crossed and the food wasn't coming. Still, we had to head back, so I took a photographic inventory of our freezer, fridge and food locker and we ordered from Instacart while on the trip home to stock up.
The difference in galleys between the 315 and the 425 is rather substantial with a lot more counter space. It's still like the kitchen in a very cramped apartment, but it is functional and because we're a bit leery of restaurants right now, we've been doing a good deal of cooking on-board. You can see that we are equipped for a wide variety of menu items.
Monday
I started out with a Delos burgee (shown below... I'm a patreon of theirs) and one from the Great Loop Association. We just joined the AGLCA... we dream of completing the loop someday.
We went out for a nice day on the water, though Vicky soon fell asleep in the cockpit
I had nice winds and a fun time sailing. My Navionics app shows the track (when I remember to start it)... and this will be typical for this week. Come out of Swan Creek, down past Rock Hall and once reaching the #3 buoy, out across the bay and back.
After returning to the dock, I made a sliced Filet dinner with orzo and brussel sprouts.
As the evening progressed, I noticed storms starting to surround us. At first it looked like Rock Hall would stay in a "hole", but that quickly changed. I sat in the cockpit and tried to capture the storm moving through (without much success... my photos and videos didn't capture the feel at the time).
Later, the storm clearly came to us. We were down below and suddenly the wind started howling and the boat started lurching and leaning. The storm supposedly packed 60 mph gusts. I cautiously poked my head out of the hatch to see Swan Creek as a boiling sea and was able to capture it on video. Below is a still from this video (Blogger suddenly doesn't seem to like iPhone videos, so I put the actual video in my SmugMug Gallery.)
I started out making breakfast. I love cooking dockside. We have a coffee maker and a real toaster when we're plugged in to the dock. Still, as you can see, making breakfast (toast sliced from home made bread, spam and eggs) is a bit of a dance. I seem to always have to move a few things to execute the next step.
After breakfast, we headed out onto a calm bay. We sailed for about 5 hours at a very slow pace. I was a bit surprised. Even thought the winds were low (3 to 5 kts.), the bay was calm enough that the sails stayed filled and we just meandered out and back at about 2 to 3 its.
Vicky passed the time doing her ab workout and later working from the cockpit seat.
We did notice a lot more crabbing going on. Perhaps this is a sign that the restaurants are doing more business.
We did our sailing early in the morning and got back shortly after lunch. The heat was unbearable, so the order of the day was some afternoon naps.
Right before sunset I went out to fill the water tanks. It's hard to believe but we're going through roughly a tank a day (Seas The Day has two 50 gal tanks) - we can clearly work on our water usage discipline before we head out to anchor for any length of time. Looking to the Northwest, I could clearly see thunderheads, but we remained under clear skies for the night.
Vicky had a complex meeting Wednesday evening and we decided it was best to head home so she could take the meeting without noise from any thunderstorms, internet drop outs or equipment noise. So she did final preparations with China on Wednesday morning and I worked on a small boat chore... that of getting a second propane tank.
Seas The Day has a propane stove top and oven. Out in the cockpit's propane locker, there is a 10 pound tank that came (presumably filled) with the boat. For the past week or two I've been wondering how long this original fill would last. On the old Seas The Day (315), we rarely cooked... out on the mooring ball it was just too much jostling around to do it safely and the only place we went to a marina was at Liberty Landing which was around so many good restaurants that we rarely ate on board. So propane usage was mostly limited to boiling water for coffee or tea or to rehydrate some freeze dried meals. Back then, we would just have the staff at Liberty Landing fill the propane tank whenever we stayed there (once a year) and never worried about it.
Now we're preparing multipot dinners, dumplings, steaks, tea effusions and the like. I've begun to realize that I might want to be either more deliberate about filling the tank or invest in a second tank. I decided to do some research... the standard in galley cooking is The Boat Galley website and they had this page on how long propane tanks should last.
So the "typical use" is 1 lb per person per week when cooking 3 meals a day. That means a 10 lb tank should last the two of us 5 weeks. but we're not on board full time, so convert 5 weeks to 35 days. Coincidently, that is the number of days (going back to orientation) that we have stayed on-board, so I was right to begin to worry. Of course, we're not cooking 3 meals a day - I'm too fond of the sandwiches at Rock Hall Liquors. Still, it's time to do something.
That something was to pull out the tank, realize there was still some propane liquid sloshing around (but not so much that we didn't have to worry), take measurements and call Village Hardware. They had matching tanks which if you purchase, you get a free fill (worth about $8 to $10 for the propane).
We now have a shiny new 10 lb Al propane tank to go with the (surprisingly cruddy) old one. Now I can just switch tanks if we run out and I just need to be disciplined to fill the next tank before we run out after that.
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