Return to Seasons

It is nearly 9pm on Monday evening, and I just made it back to the boat after flying in from Peoria. My flights were not too bad, especially because I got a first class seat for the last leg into Jacksonville after I got bumped off my earlier flight. Bear seems to be in fine shape after spending the last couple days by her lonesome. I, on the other hand, am feeling ambivalent, missing Margaret, but excited about getting some work done here on the boat.

A couple of the chainplates on the nav station, with beer (Sierra Nevada Torpedo and water)

Our forward port chainplate before disassembly and removal

Margaret and I spent a bit of time over the weekend talking about what still needed to be accomplished before we splash in May and what we can hold off on until next winter. Amongst the jobs we discussed, nothing loomed larger than replacing the chainplates.
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You might ask how you fit the Grateful Dead, cruising, and computer programming together. Well, I am going to do it in this post.

First off, the Grateful Dead: I have been working on a new website that I would like to invite you all to check out, Grateful Dead of the Day. Each day, I choose what I consider to be the best Grateful Dead show from that day in history, provide a write up about the music, the venue, and the history of the band, and provide a player so that readers can stream the show for themselves. Come back often, like it on Facebook below, and please pass along the address – www.gratefuldeadoftheday.com – to any Deadheads you might know.
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Sunday was another beautiful day in Miami, just slightly warmer than the day before. My Dad and I got to the boat show in the mid-morning, parking again down by Bayside and the Strictly Sail area. After arriving, we quickly popped into the Strictly Sail tent to sign up for a free subscription to Blue Water Sailing Magazine, which I had forgotten to do the day before. Every time Margaret and I go to a boat show, we always make sure we “renew” our subscriptions to Blue Water and Cruising World. So far, I think we have been receiving both magazines for free for the past three years.
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After hauling down from Illinois to Florida and picking up my Dad near Charlotte Harbor, the two of us rolled into the Miami Boat Show around 2pm today. We started off at the Strictly Sail portion of the show, casing the vendors who were set up under a large tent at the Bayside Marketplace, a great outdoor mall fronting the water in downtown. After moving through that area, we headed over to the main show at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Finally, we returned to Bayside, both tuckered out, and got ourselves some dinner before leaving for our hotel by the international airport.
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Ever since we were in St. Mary’s working on the boat, Margaret and I have been discussing what still absolutely needs to get done and all the jobs that we would like to finish before we splash her in May. We have managed to dismiss a number of tasks from both lists, realizing that some can wait until a later date or are just not that critical. But, try as we might, we cannot completely eliminate all the jobs from either list. While a good deal of this work we can do from Peoria, such as making the cockpit and v-berth cushions, other jobs like tending to the mast and rigging can only be accomplished at the boat. Consequently, Margaret and I have settled on a plan of attack for those things that we need to be on site to finish.
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After waiting for packages of parts to be delivered – and shipped – over the last three weeks while we are working on Bear in Georgia, I figured I would share what we learned about some of the chandleries that are out there.

First off, we discovered that most places on the internet do not actually have their own warehouses or only keep a very small number of items in stock. Since we needed the materials we were purchasing quickly, I always called directly before placing an order, making sure the company could actually ship in a timely fashion. Time after time, the “discount” marine stores on the web could not guarantee when things would be sent out because the items were actually being shipped from another party’s warehouse or, more often, multiple other parties’ warehouses. I am sure there are others (and please comment about your experiences), but the only online retailers we found that seemed to be shipping from their own warehouses were West Marine, Defender, Jamestown, Fisheries Supply, and Freeport Marine.
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