Murphy's Law Prevails

Marilyn here … from now on, it’ll be me writing, unless Jeff specifically identifies himself.

So you’ve heard of the old “Murphy’s Law” – if anything can go wrong, it will – right? Well, today was a perfect example …

I woke up with the cold I’ve been fighting off all Winter, and covered in bug bites from the noseeums here in this windless hurricane hole where Sea Change is moored. (Still better than -25 degrees, or whatever ….).  Despite my ills I did manage to remove the rust that had blossomed all over the stainless steel (not!) fittings during our month away from the boat.

Then Jeff decided that today is the day to go up the mast for the repairs that are needed at the top.  So he worked his way up (a good half-hour of hard labor on our mast climber, with me spotting and managing the safety line) – only to discover that he hadn’t left enough line on the climber to make it all the way to the top. So, a few feet away from his goal, he had to climb down and give it up for now (no way to do that twice in one day!).

Ah, well – we decided to just slip our mooring and head over to the yacht club dock for water, etc. With the mooring lines released, Jeff shifted into forward – but no go! The transmission was still not working properly, despite the hour Jeff had spent on it yesterday. And now we were floating smoothly into the boat next door, with no forward movement to steer us off! As Jeff jumped into our attached dinghy to fend off “Grateful Red”, Bob (our host) appeared and threw me a line to tie us up to another mooring ball – just in the nick of time! Whew – we both needed drinks after all that, and a beautiful sunset and the appearance of a sea turtle swimming by helped us feel that the day had not been a total loss.

Tomorrow we’ll cash in on our “Tow-boat US” insurance to get us over to the Exuma Yacht Club dock so we can hire a mechanic to help with the transmission problem. And we still have not been successful with getting the solar panels working properly. So when all of that gets taken care of, maybe we can go cruising … we’ll see. It’s still better in the Bahamas J.