The weather has got colder, with warmish days in between.
We are waiting for our new sails to arrive and look forward to bending them on and making sure everything works the way it should.
In the Facnor instructions it tells you to splice the line for the furler so it becomes a continuous loop and makes for a tidier cockpit.
After Sandy's success in making monkey fist tie backs for the curtains, she was a natural to do the splicing.
Well, maybe not!
The line we use is not the usual 3 strand stuff. This is smooth, braided line, so it has a core and an outer cover. After much research and video clips the bit of sample rope we'd bought to practice on was a shredded mess on the floor. It looked like an exploded sheep.
But I do have a few new additions to my Sailor's Dictionary. They maybe not be useful words in terms of instruction or information, but they do seem to let sailors express their innermost feelings!
It didn't help when I stepped on the only fid that had a chance of success either. (a fid is a pointed weapon to open up rope for splicing).
We've both been struggling with motivation recently too. The let down of realizing we are going to be here for another 3 months or so rather than sailing in the Caribbean has affected us more than we expected. When it's freezing cold and wet there is no joy in living on a boat.
We are still working but at half pace. It could be that we are just plain straight tired too.
On top of that Sandy has been dealing with not very good news from Australia in the form of her son, Tim, needing corrective eye surgery, followed by the deaths of 2 people she knew in totally unrelated circumstances.
In fact she was so ill with it for a couple of days we missed out on an all American Thanksgiving dinner. It's a pity really because it was a one off oportunity. Such is life.
Thanksgiving is probably bigger than Christmas over here.
They even have the equivalent of our Boxing Day sales after it. Here they are called Black Friday sales. I think they must have been named by a turkey.
Sandy has started on the last basin and tiles, probably the most challenging one. Not many parallel lines and the position and plumbing is all changing too.
I've started working on getting the name boards off the transom. The wooden plugs covering the screws have to be located, then broken out, and in theory the screws undone.
The plugs have been stuck in with some formidable gloop so they don't just break out but have to be virtually chiselled out. The brass screws are so smothered in this stuff it is impossible to get a screwdriver to grip, so it's looking like a drill out job for every screw.
This is all done from the dinghy so the movement is constant.
We really should have just bought a boat with a better name!
Talking of dinghies, Sandy and I managed to manouver the new one down to the dock where we assembled it and pumped it up. It is so much better than the one we had to send back. It is heavy so getting the davits right for lifting it is important and is in fact the next of the major jobs. It is going to take some designing ingenuity but will be worth it I'm sure.
As I said at the outset, not much to tell at all.
Until next time...