Off to Boston

I'm currently at Charleston Airport at 5:30am to fly to Boston for the day, via LGA on the way up and ATL on the way back. Judy Handley has their duffel-bag-sized medical kit & some other boat stuff for us, and we're going to lunch across the river in Charlestown. If all goes to plan I'll be back at 8:15pm. Should be one of those fun little daytrips that only make sense if you're an airline employee or have a whole mess of frequent flyer miles. Dawn is staying home to do some major provisioning...she's spent several days making a long list. 

Mike and Alex from CCBY spent yesterday reinstalling the stem iron, anchor rollers, bow pulpit, and associated hardware. It took a lot of cutting and rewelding over the last week & a half to get the stem iron to fit correctly, but it sits right and looks good now. The riggers George & Pete (brothers) showed up mid-afternoon and started tuning the rig. At first they thought the lowers were longer on the starboard side than the port side, but I think the problem was that the boat has a bit of a starboard list...the salon cabinets on the port side aren't completely reinstalled yet and are thus mostly empty while the starboard side has a lot of heavy tools & spare parts in it. There's still a problem with the intermediate backrunners, they appear to be too short. Not sure how that happened, the brothers are bringing the originals today along with some longer toggles and will try to make it work without having to make up a new set of stays.

Yesterday Dawn and I put the boom back on & rerigged the mainsheet, outhaul, reefing clew lines, and boom vang. I started to rerig the Gybe-EZ and realized that the new shroud toggles on the mid chainplates are just a scosh larger than the originals, precluding me from clipping snatch blocks there with D-shackles as Mark did. I'll lash them on with Spectra instead - we definitely want the Gybe-EZ in place if we sail south early next week, as it's looking to be a brisk downwind run. I also hooked up the SSB antenna & tested it out listening to the USCG high seas forecast. Reception seems to be less than optimal, but I didn't shut down much of the equipment in the boat and there may be a fair bit of RF interference in the yard.

We may have some company for our sail to Jacksonville. Lance and Andy, two good friends & fellow airline pilots who are experienced cruising sailors, have the time off and are interested in going offshore with us. Lance has actually sailed on Windbird before, back in September when we took her for an overnight to Southport NC & back. But if we're going to sail Tuesday as I'd like, a lot still has to happen between now & then. We're making progress on our list but not quite so quickly as I'd like. Ideally the brothers would finish rigging today, Jeff from Tidal Marine would finish the autopilot install & we'd do commissioning/sea trials on Friday, Dawn and I would finish with the running rigging & bend the sails on over the weekend, & the riggers would do a final sea-trial tweak on Monday while giving the rig a bit of a workout in forecast 25-kt northeasterlies. That's a lot of ideals and very little of this refit has gone ideally, so we'll just see what happens.