Saturday October 13: Good News and Bad News

The good news: Yesterday's Dream did indeed go back in the water on Thursday. Finally!!! It was good to be back in the water .... again. The bad news is: we still are leaking water from the shaft log into the boat. The good news: we are headed south anyway :-) The two nights we spent on the boat made us feel like we were really almost home!

I guess the moral of this story is that water will find it's way in no matter what you do. We've actually decided that it is better to know where the water is coming in than to totally block it and not know where else it is moving - possibly causing damage that we could not see. But at this point we are confident that the repairs we had done made certain the boat is structurally very sound and we will have no issues traveling. What's nice is we were able to find the issue and determine why the water was coming in. So the plan is to bring the boat back here next spring and have the shaft log replaced. This can be done while we are in Canada living on Guppy. Sounds like a good plan to us .....

The marina let Steve use their giant wrench again to finish tightening the prop. Once that was done, our part in getting the boat in the water was finished.

Asa aligned the engine Friday and we were then good to go.

Meantime, we headed off to Oriental Friday morning to meet some friends.

Jim and Linda from Edisto Island, SC were on their way south and stopped for the night in Oriental - about a 15 minute drive from our marina! This is the couple from Selah that we traveled with from Chicago and the inland rivers.

We were fortunate enough to be able to stop at their home twice now - what a wonderful couple - it was so good to see them again :-)

Jim and Linda's new boat is Symmetry II (in the background left) and is a beautiful Symbol trawler.

We were able to join them for both dinner Thursday night and breakfast Friday morning for some good catch up time. Our plans will take us to Edisto Island on our way south - sometime around Thanksgiving. They have already graciously invited us to plan our stop around Thanksgiving so we would celebrate the holiday with them at their home in South Carolina.

The sunrise Friday on the way to Oriental was incredible! First sunrise I have seen in a while :-)

Today we had hoped to move the boat to a marina closer to Matt and Wendy's place but the wind didn't cooperate - we took the spray from the ferry hitting us on the upper deck as a sign that tomorrow might be a better day! So that is the plan for tomorrow morning - move the boat.. We'll stay next week at Matt and Wendy's house to take care of Fozzi as they both need to be out of town until next Sunday.

So the plan is we move on next Sunday - maybe a whole 30 miles to Morehead City :-)