Summer Coming to an End!

Boy Summer sure has gotten away from me! I acquired a job at The Ship's Taylor right after we arrived here in Deltaville. While working at Ship's Taylor I have learned a new craft which will serve me well in Florida. I'm planning to do small canvas repairs for other cruisers while in Marathon. Larry returned to his job as Dock Master here at Doziers Marina and is now also employed at West Marine the local boating supply center. He also fills in as a driver for Sea Tow. We, with the help of the extra cash working has provided us, have been doing many much needed maintenance tasks and up grades to the boat. With all that said, our blog and email have been put on the back burner. I felt some of you probably wondered what happened to us. We are doing well and getting anxious to start moving again.

We were fortunate again this year to have a visit from our Grandsons, Jonathan and Joseph. I've shared below some of the pictures we took of that visit.

We took a short cruise up the Rappahannock River and spent a few days in Urbanna. While we where there it rained and the boys learned the fine art of bailing the dinghy with a bilge pump. We just needed to decide what end goes overboard!

We took many swims off the dinghy while at anchor in Carter Creek. What fun we had and as you can see we are very good swimmers.

On our way back to Deltaville, Papa did some trolling and caught several Blue fish but none we big enough for keepers.

More rain back in Deltaville! This time the water was deep enough for two bilge pumps going in tandem.

The men's group at church planned a fishing trip on the local charter boat the Tortuga and Larry joined in the fun. This time he caught some keepers and we enjoyed them.

One of our maintenance jobs was to haul the boat and paint the bottom and clean and wax the hull. This picture shows us on the hard after the work was done. Doesn't she look pretty! We hauled out on a Friday and were all done by Sunday but oops we had a problem! Sounds familiar! Larry decided to sand the prop and paint it to discourage the barnacles. While he was sanding he felt the shaft had more play in it than it should. He felt our cutlass barring might need changing. After having a conformation from the marina owner a plan was made to have it changed on Monday. They had to call in an outside shop that had the tool to remove it. No problem, well not until they went to tighten the set screw on the strut that hold the shaft. There is something that happens to metal when DC current flows in the water, it's called electrolysis and it destroys the metal. We have zinc mounted on the shaft to help prevent this, unfortunately it still happened to us. Now we needed to wait until a strut after ordered came to the marina. After being out of the water eight days we finally came back home to Doziers. We now have two zinc on the strut, two on the shaft and one connected to a shroud and hanging in the water. No over kill here. After checking many possible reasons we still don't know how or why this happened but hopefully, we are fully covered now.