Century Club: mike pitchford

The Mighty Quinn should have donned her winter cover a month ago, as noted in my last entry. However, the winter cover, as is, would have pooled water. I tried using flexible 1" PVC to make a frame for the cover. This has worked before, shrink wrapping a former bigger boat. However, this time the tight radius needed for a smaller boat made it a bad idea.

I settled on the idea of custom saw horses as the center-line ridge that would keep a slope on the cover and eliminate water pooling. These are easily made of 2x4s, which I purchased and placed on the dock. But I needed to order the saw horse joiners from Home Depot. That was delay one.

So today I had the saw horse joiners in hand and walked down to the dock to initiate the second attempt at a winter cover. First I had to properly adjust the bunk boards and guide poles on the lift for this boat. Why I didn't do that when it was warm is anybody's guess.

The Mighty Quinn, already winterized, was briefly back in the water so I could makes the adjustments which went very well. Back on the lift and level, I went to start cutting the lumber to make the custom saw horses. The lumber was gone.

It seems we had an extreme high tide or two in the past week. Unbeknownst to me, the lumber intended for the saw horses drifted off the dock during one king tide event or the other. It is either that or the geese took them.

Diverted from my main task, I winter covered the rowing dinghy and strapped it and the kayaks to the floating dock, ready for a strong winter blow. Tomorrow I will go back to Home Depot, buy some additional 2x4s and hopefully complete the winter cover install.

So we got the boat down to FL on November 3rd. We flew home for some meetings and then back to FL on the 8th, election day. Unfortunately for us a late season tropical system was forming in the eastern Caribbean Sea. Nicole would eventually make landfall just north of us in Stuart FL. A good radar picture at about 1:00am on November 10th showed the edge of the eye of Nicole over our heads.

The days after our arrival were dedicated to getting storm ready. The rest of our week were dedicated to unwinding the storm prep and getting back to normal south Fl fall.

Our first leg was a "delivery" run from Annapolis to Myrtle Beach in three and a half days.  It was fun but not necessarily relaxing.

We left the boat in Myrtle Beach a few days to get back to Annapolis to attend some meetings and events. We came back down on Friday to begin a more relaxing run that will end up in Stuart FL. 

Several of our cruising friends from the Annapolis Yacht Club are also making their way south. We were in Georgetown, SC on Saturday when AYC cruiser Tom Muha arrived on his boat, TLC, with AYC cruiser Ron Ricketts as crew.  On Sunday, Bob Smith on the Mary Kathryn arrived with AYC cruiser Jim Brantley as crew.  The happy coincidence was celebrated with shared beverages and meals while recounting the trip so far and looking into the future ICW legs.

Now we are in Charleston, SC for a couple days.  Charleston is such a "foodie" town, we are having fun trying various restaurants.   

The ZipWake parts arrived as scheduled on Wednesday and were expertly installed by Robert from JGordon and Co.  Winsome WInn was launched on Friday and made the short trip home so I could load and provision fer the trip south that is to begin on Saturday.