Friday October 4: New Bern, NC: It's a Boat, After all ....

Where does the time go? We left Wayfarer's Cove this past Monday morning having finally spent the night before on the boat instead of Matt and Wendy's place. We were fortunate enough to be able to have Joe and Joy from High Spirits join us for the evening (they had just returned to their boat after spending the summer in New Hampshire).

No sooner had we traveled the 300 yards to the entrance out of the marina and the engine died. Dead. No restart. Floating around with thankfully a mud bottom and little wind.

No problem. We know what to do. Diesel engines are amazing simple. Either it has fuel or not. If not, it has air in the system and we need to bleed the system (which we have not had to do for 5 years!).

Not sure why or how the air got into the system but we go to work. Steve entertains himself by taking pictures of the cool jellyfish while we wait for the guys from the marina to come and tow us back to a dock.

Safely secured, we spent the next couple of hours bleeding the fuel system and sitting at the dock running the engine to gain some confidence before heading off for the 2 1/2 hour trip up the Neuse River to New Bern - our home for the next month.

What have we been doing the last week and a half? Darned if I know. Seems like there was always work on the boat trying to get it ready to go back in the water or work at Matt and Wendy's to the same end.

Or spending time on the internet ordering things. It's so nice to have a place to send things that we have put off ordering for the boat - or things that we are just now finding out that we need to complete projects here on the boat.

And one thing always leads to another. Steve was just looking for one thing - next you know he's waist deep under the walkaround deck cleaning out everything and wanting to make a speadsheet to inventory what all is under there.

Meanwhile I continued to work away scanning papers for record keeping. Nice to have a very small scanner to help cut back on record keeping.

And of course there is always crazy dog Fozzie who decided to take a stroll out of the house Friday night ON OUR WATCH. Couldn't find him - spent 2 hours Friday night and more hours Saturday searching the neighborhood for him (remember: he's 13, deaf and doesn't see so well). It was awful. My hair is now really turning gray at a speed the kids never made it do. Must be because I was younger then. Anyway, he was saved by another dog who found him Saturday afternoon. I don't need this kind of stress in my life: he now has a gps collar and if he pulls this again, he's mine :-)

In the meantime, we've replace the front cabin TV when ours died (apparently it didn't like being idle for so long) and have just about finished hauling our stuff from Matt and Wendy's to the boat. They are so patient and accepting of providing a closet for us to store stuff :-)


The beautiful sunsets continue to come - weather is wonderful - I don't know what else we could ask for.

We'll be here until after Matt's change of command on Oct 17th and then we'll help them pack and move to Camp Lejeune (his next assignment) as best we can. I think packing is more my speed than the actual moving. Then we'll be heading south.

In the meantime, I did celebrate yet another birthday - amazing how quickly they come around these days. One fun thing about being at Matt and Wendy's around my birthday is I get a real card and brownies!!

Matt and Wendy found a GREAT card this year that I just have to share as I've had so much fun with it. Enjoy :-)

In fact, we liked it so well, that we recycled it to Steve's sister Terri who's birthday was just a few days ago!

Blogging will be irregular as we spend the next 3 weeks here - I will update if there is something the least bit 'fun' going on!