Well, I guess the season is over.  Way over, I suppose, but we never really stop thinking and planning and putzing with boat projects.  It was fantastic to attend Bill and Ella’s holiday marina gathering last weekend.  I didn’t do an official count, but it seemed like there were 30 people from the marina at least.  The food was great, it was really nice to see everyone and catch up, and Oh My Gosh the sailing conversations were EPIC!  I loved it!  Everyone got to spend lots of quality time visiting and talking and just being part of our “Sailing Family”.  It was fantastic to get Dennis cornered and gabbing about all their plans and to get tons of great insights into all the sailing issues they run into sailing the Pacific waters near New Zealand on their boat Landfall.  Too bad Barb wasn’t there, it would have been great to see her too.  And we were able to get a bunch of quality time to talk with Craig and Sue and get all their perspective from cruising the Caribbean for the last several years.  Lots of their information will come in very handy for us when we can eventually cast off and go cruising.  Thanks to Bill and Ella for their hospitality and Guest Room yet again.

We are having another of our cherished weekends at home to catch up on all the things we never seem to have time for and to enjoy some down time.  We got the new dinghy hung up in the garage for the winter.  She’s safe now and can just “Hang Out” for a few months until we can get her keel wet and introduce her to Wandering Toes.  It took me a while to get the parts I needed to make it happen.  The dinghy had a davit system installed on it when we got it that was built for the stern of a powerboat.  If anyone needs this particular hardware, just let me know.  I removed those hardware pieces and installed a couple of new stainless pad-eyes in their place.  Of course, those needed a slight modification to fit exactly.  For future reference, a Tungsten Carbide grinding bit in a Dremel tool will go through any amount of stainless steel with relative ease.  I was able to elongate the holes about 1/8″ to make the pad-eyes fit perfectly on the existing hardware.  I really did not want to drill new holes in the dinghy or try to patch old ones.  Now she has good lifting points that will work for when we have davits….eventually, someday, soon hopefully.  Then we undertook the task of getting her lifted up into position. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard to lift a 110lb. dinghy.  In the end, I lifted and Marge pulled on the ropes and it wasn’t too difficult.  House projects next.

But first!  We found a fantastic deal on new instruments for Wandering Toes at Defender.  They had a Christmas sale and saved us some bucks, so we jumped and ordered our new B&G Wind, Speed and Depth system instruments and they came very quickly!  All this is part of the mast rework and so we’re amassing all of the parts and pieces we’ll need to install all new instruments, radar and lights over the course of the winter.  Just keeping my eye out for a rebate or special on the B&G Radar before I bite on that one.

Our plans for January and February are to survive another winter (which is being nice to us so far), and to really try to finish up the house.  It’s been 9 years since we built and about time we make the final push to finish the leftover details.  Carpeting the living room and bedroom floors and finishing up the trim work, a couple of closet doors and a ceiling fan and we can put a cap on this project.  I have no desire anymore to do house projects and I will be glad to be done with the main building part and able to just enjoy the house in a finished state.