Road Trip Day 3

We are in Saskatoon.  Rather long drive today but we made it in pretty good time.  This was our first drive across the prairies and, well, ah, it tends to get monotonous after a while.  But Saskatoon seems very nice.  Pauline decided to put on her charms and get us a room at the Delta Bessborough Hotel which is a historical landmark on the river.  We not only got a great rate we got a river view upgrade! We are off now to explore the waterfront.  Note the weather has been great today hitting 80 degrees F which is almost 27 C.  So we want to head out and enjoy it before the evening cool sets in.

view from our room

view of the hotel from the river

view of the front of the hotel

Road Trip Day 2

We made it as far as Devil's Lake, North Dakota.  We drove into Superior, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota but didn't find much worth stopping for so we kept heading west and made it past Grand Forks.  The drive today not as pretty nor much wildlife but there was very little rain and literally no wind.

We head foreign tomorrow as we cross into Canada.  Will hit duty free and money changer as we cross the border.  Not much room in the car for duty free but we can always carry a bottle or two on our laps!

Road Trip Day 1

We left Grand Haven this morning and made it as far as Ironwood.  We stopped in Sleeping Bear Dunes and Petoskey.  We were going to Picture Rocks but it was raining pretty hard when we hit Munsing so we continued on.  We did see a deer, lots of pheasants, and a few eagles.  The colors are starting to change but only just.  It still made a pretty trip so far even with the off and on rain.  It was really blowing at the dunes and crossing the bridge.  But safe travel so far.

Sand dunes with Lake Michigan

Grand Haven Happenings

Well we made it to GH.  We swear every time we fly United it gets a bit worse, and the overnight flight from Anchorage to Chicago was the worst one yet.  Even the African airlines and Asian budget carriers are now superior to United.  It was a brand new plane, completely full, the seats are now closer together so everyone was on top of one another.  You now pay for luggage so everyone loads up with cabin luggage.  On a crowded overnight where everyone is so bunched together you figure well we can watch the movies.  Not any more they are pay for view, and would not be available until two hours outside of Chicago so just hang out with a book.  Oh did I mention that there are only two toilets in economy and one of them was malfunctioning.  Or there is no meal on United flights anymore, there is a packaged snack for purchase!  So the next time someone uses that phrase it is easier to fly then sail I will retort not on US airlines!

But everything is not all bad.  Since arriving the weather has been great.  The wedding was really nice, we have been to Wei Wei's and Fricano's.  The car has been serviced and most things packed for the trip north.  We hope to hit the Tip a Few tonight or tomorrow for a burrito.  We have been delayed at least six hours in our departure as FedEx didn't get our chains to us Saturday.  We will probably just hold off and leave early Tuesday instead, but figure we can make up time enroute.

So keep watching we will post our progress as we go along.

Status

Well we got all the sails off and the gear on deck tied down.  The low has hit, it has only reached 44 knots up until now, but our new spot is much more protected.  It is supposed to get worse before we leave tomorrow.

We tried to get a leak fixed before we depart tomorrow.  This meant a few days of digging and grinding out a bunch of dry rot underneath  the deck and around the starboard aft laz.  We rebuilt it with synthetic materials although Mark didn't finish glassing as much as he wanted.  But he thought he got it.  Of course with all this rain we see we didn't get it all.  We did manage to turn that crappy brown water that usually indicates rot ito nice clean water and the leak is very tiny now so hopefully when we get back we can trace it and stop it with some gunk until spring.  Of course the leak being tiny Means it will be hard to trace.  But it should be fun.

 We do not have much to do, a bit of laundry and some final packing and we will head to Anchorage.

Whoops we moved

Hey everyone.  We are no longer at the end of H dock.  The marina advised us to move to E32 for the winter.  Their statement said it is a long rough walk during winter storms to or from our boat.  We agree so since it has become available we moved to E32.  This is a lot closer to the winter showers, and shoreline, plus we have some protection from those storms that roar out of the NW, so we have changed our scenery for the winter, not many houses can do that!

21 Years Ago, Partners

Wow, 21 years Mark and Pauline met and they have been taking care of me since.  Of course I take care of them too doing things like carrying them to all these great destinations.  But thanks for the new varnish guys.  When we get to Mexico, new paint?

Another Cruise

We took a day off to go on another cruise.  This one with Major Marine Tours, part of the company Pauline works for and hence a perk trip for us.  When the Rileys were here, we did the cruise with Kenai Fjords Tours so this gave us a chance to compare.  Of course a little later in the season so some of the animals were a bit more scarce. We got our best surface show by a humpback we have ever seen.  We first spotted him doing a chin plunge and then he proceeded to do a tail flapping show for over five minutes so everyone got a multitude of tail shots.  We then watched some harbor seals sunning themselves and when we headed around to the glaciers we were notified of a pod of transient orcas feeding just outside of Holgate Glacier.  As we were speeding over to them, the male hit a Dall's Porpoise and supposedly threw him about 30 feet through the air.  We missed this but because they had just gorged, the orcas stayed around cruising for a while and we got a great chance to watch them.

We got to view Holgate Glacier this time, which was new for us.  A great day out.  Thanks Major Marine Tours.

Harbor seals sunning themselves

tail flapping show by the humpback whale

Holgate Glacier

male orca

male and female pair

Finished Varnishing for the Year

Actually this post is a bit premature.  As we have about an hour to go, or one last coat on a couple of areas and we can remove the last of the blue tape.

We didn't get everything done this year.  We had planned to do the rubbing streak and the companionway boards as well.  The rubbing streak was mostly scraped back but was not varnished and only the bottom two boards were varnished for the campanionway.  Instead we made a replacement board for the top two drop boards with two pieces of acrylic separated by a wood frame as this allows so much more light in and we figure will be nice as the shorter days of an Alaskan winter come on us.

What we did achieve is all the trim, cap rails, taff rails, and forward sign boards.  All the windows have been done, and the grab rails.  We didn't even attempt the bowsprit and the rubbing streak will wait until next year.  We also didn't do the hatch trim but most of those look ok and hopefully will last another year.

Just as we were finishing off the varnishing, we were wondering how to get new name decals when all of a sudden we were remotely introduced to Sasha and Gretchen via our friends Chris and Kerry from Guam.  Sasha works in the Anchorage office of the company Pauline worked for in Guam.  He volunteered to take on designing, ordering and delivering for us.  Mucho thanks go to him.  You can zoom in on the pictures and check out his artwork.