A life in the day of.....

It’s been more than 3 months since we last posted and I wish we could tell you we’re somewhere exotic or remote...... but we ain’t, we’re still in the Chesapeake, Portsmouth to be exact and will be for another few weeks. So the other week as we were riding back from the supermarket it struck us that we might write about how we spend our time as an insight into this cruising life. Well our cruising life at any rate.

Whenever we go ashore and more especially when we’re tied up for the winter we develop a routine that is really about foraging for food and fuel. Bee has the art of cheap living cracked and will spend a portion of most days checking out the shelves of local stores... She recently found flour at $2 a 5lb bag and we rode out to buy 40lbs worth. But on the way back we stopped at the roadside to load pine cones into the bags. Pine cones are a wonderful, free source of heat. Great to start a fire with or revive a flagging one and available to anyone who wants them. The forepeak is stuffed with bags of the things. They fight for space with the bits of tree we have found and brought back to the yard to be cut up and stored. So these two activities are an important part of the day. Shopping is opportunistic; if the item is on special then we buy as much as we can afford. But shopping for bargains requires a tenacious dedication, the ability to troll round likely places that may prove useful or otherwise. The other day Bee decided we needed to stock up on onions, as we’ll soon be heading out. The local Wal-Mart had them at 50c a pound and 50lb was the figure we had in mind. She rode off but decided to check out another store before committing....a brief conversation with a guy in the back of the store followed and he agreed to sell 48lb for a dollar more than they paid. Result was 48lb (about 22kg) of onions for $16, so enough to last us well into the Azores.

Wine is another area we spend time on. Yes I know we drink the stuff every day but we also make it ‘cos it’s cheaper. We filtered another 9 litres of Rice and Raisin a few weeks back, having misjudged the first batch we’d made by drinking it too quickly. For red we use a local grape juice. The drawback to this one is it takes 3 or 4 months to “mature” whilst the R&R is about a month. Obviously neither is suited to brewing on the move but fine when alongside. However in the pursuit of saving money Bee came up with the idea that we should re-use the rice and raisin mixture. After all, she reasoned, all we’d done was add water and yeast to the two ingredients, let it stand for two weeks, and then squeezed the liquid through a tacky bit of muslin to start the wine off.... OK the rice was still hard and it might be acceptable in a risotto style dish........We tried it. But we’re talking about nearly 2kgs of rice here so that’s a lot of meals; the risotto came out a glutinous mess and almost inedible so, despite our best efforts, it ended up being dumped. Sometimes we just have to accept that we can’t always recycle.

The months here have also given us a further chance to make changes or improvements to Hannah. Very often they’re small, jobs we’ve had on a list (ah the list-tales could be told about boat lists...) or thoughts that come to us to make life easier. We recently completed the installation of a couple of vents to improve ventilation in the boat and Cary has just finished a back for the doghouse to ensure we remain dry in following seas. Toots, of course, assumes the Lexan sheet is installed to cut out the draughts as she dozes in the sun. Perhaps it is...Hopefully the security of a “window” and door may make the difference to her and stop her scuttling off under the dinghy when the seas get up. Do wonders for our nerves as well. Probably the single biggest success has been the tracing of a fault in our solar panel set-up which meant we were rarely getting much of a charge into the batteries. The improvement since the removal of the fault has been marked and we look forward to a reduction in engine running time on trans-Atlantics. All the many jobs we’ve undertaken have been made easier by having the use of Cary’s shop. He runs a yacht restoration business and allows us access to tools and materials and has a fund of useful techniques to make projects easier. He’s introduced us to his family and we’ve spent several evenings with him and his wife Linda and with his mum Shirley and Sandy his sister. Cary has a neat turn of phrase, delivered in a deadpan style with a very strong Southern accent. He was recently repairing the bowsprit on his boat which had rotted. Having dug out all of the wet wood he’d allowed it to dry before soaking the offending area in “Git Rot” an epoxy material which harden the fibres prior to finishing the job. I asked if the stuff was any good........”let me tell you” he said “this stuff makes the timber harder than a wedding dick...” and then listening to a rambling conversation between him and Joe, his right hand man, I heard Joe saying that he needed, at 70, to be doing more exercise as he was putting on weight. Cary, with scarcely a pause said, “ Joe, at your age you wanna be happy enough to be still vertical...”

Robin and Jackie recently sailed south to try and make up their mind about what to do this summer. They have an RV which they use to cruise around the US and see more of the country than oiks like us who are more concerned with, well you know what drives us. Anyway they’re very good friends of ours and they also sail a gaffer and we’ve shared many a glass of wine into the drunken hours. Bee, the youngest of the four, looks on with trepidation as the music gets louder and the old gits get nostalgic about Elvis et al and karaoke becomes the order of the night. Mostly we blame Jackie who has an obsession with the Willie Nelson version of “City of New Orleans”, to the point where we too are addicted. We only need to hear those opening bars and we’re away...and it’s all down hill after that. They’re very loose with the RV and seem to offer it to all and sundry – we once expressed a mild interest and they had us driving it down from Maine to Texas for them. Luckily we came to our senses and turned it down, otherwise we’d have missed all that wine...... But her brother took them up on the use and spent a few days in Maine with it. After a few days he cut short his holiday on the grounds he’d seen Maine and it was just “white houses and pine trees...” Can’t argue with that I guess! The other cruisers who have figured prominently in these pages are currently languishing in Quatar; Pete and Lucia are working there for about a year. They’re both civil engineers and are under the belief that they can earn more there than they can shelf filling for Asda.... (Surely not?) We spoke to them recently via Skype to hear the temperature is already hitting 30c and will top 50c in summer. Apparently when it gets to 55c, folks are excused working outside. Their boat is still in Belfast and they intend to pick up again in a year or so.

Wintering on the Chesapeake has been mixed and whilst it sometimes drops to freezing it can just as likely be in the 20’s. For the last few days its been grey, wet and cold.....We get weather updates from friends in Maine – snow and more snow although the last one spoke of getting ready to tap the Maple trees for the syrup and Ollie, Bee’s mum, keeps us updated on the UK weather but mostly our thoughts turn to wondering about what the weather will be when we come to leave the US and head back toward the Azores. At the moment a front is passing through bringing heavy rain and gusts of 40-45knots. 40 knots in winter conditions out at sea will not be comfortable and we’d rather avoid it. But the calmer weather doesn’t arrive until May (in theory) and we have to leave before then. Ah well, by the time I come to write the next page we will have experienced whatever it is.

23 March. And finally. Our permit to be in the US was nearing its end date and we checked out ways in which we could legitimately stay on a little longer. There is only one way and the procedure is outlined on the US Gov. website. It is not possible to walk in to the Custom and Immigration Office unless you have first made an electronic appointment. We did so and on the day Cary drove me and a nervous Bee to the office. We got through security and sat down to wait. We were called forward and explained the situation to a very sympathetic guy behind the screen. He wished he could help but we actually needed to speak to the Customs and Border Patrol office as they handled I-94’s (the permit that was soon to expire) He provided us with an address and phone number for the airport and away we went. The CBP office was having none of it and insisted that the office we had come from were now handling applications for extensions but printed the form off to fill in......we called the number given and got another sympathetic person who patiently explained that the Custom Immigration Service took over the handling of these extensions after “9/11” and that we could fill it in electronically and needed to do so quickly as we were running out of time. WE drove back to Cary’s house to fill in the form. It requires a payment of US$300 and this has to be paid electronically too. Bear in mind that the folks who are filling in these forms are foreign tourists who, for various reasons, want to remain in the States beyond the date on the I-94. We try to fill in our credit card details but it kept getting rejected as we don’t have a US registered card. Now this seemed a fundamental flaw to me but calling the CBP guy resulted only in the suggestion we find a friendly US citizen and borrow their card. “I know, it’s a crock o’ shit and by the way” he said “ these things can take up to a year to process....”  

And the bad news is our camera has died and refused to take any photos. Bee thinks the iris may be cracked so you’ll have to put up with your own imagination until we sort something out. Not surprisingly the cost of repair is such that it is cheaper to buy a new camera according to the local dealer who quoted US$150 - $250 to look at it.

And to catch up on where we left the last posting re; clunks and rattles from the gearbox. Well, surprise, surprise it turned out to be the R&D drive plate had sheared. The various people we spoke to had no idea why but Belfast Boatyard tracked down a replacement and around Christmas time the new one arrived. Horrendously expensive compared to the UK and even correspondence/phone call with the manufacturer came up with no explanation as to why. And of course it wasn’t in the warranty period......