Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Happy 4th on the 9th!

As I've mentioned before, I'm a procrastinator!!


It also doesn't help that a certain someone (Hans!) deactivated the wireless connection from his cell phone right before our trip. That meant that I had no internet!!! No internet for the whole weekend!!!! Talk about roughing it.



The picture below is not some sort of Super Nova but the fireworks that we watched during our long weekend in Annapolis.







Take a look at the red neck awning that we rigged up on our boat. After Hans and I got fried last month after a long weekend of full sun exposure we knew we had to do something. So Hans brought a tarp and bungee cords with us this past weekend and we came up with this. I think we raised a few eyebrows while our 'neighbors' watched in amusement as we strung this baby up.





A lovely little mother duck brought her brood along to watch.







I'm sure our popularity grew amongst the club members when I hung our laundry out (towards the front of the boat) to dry on the lifelines. For some reason I think this is considered to be gauche.




Like I really care.



The only real issue we suffered with our red neck awning was the fact that we couldn't get a real good seal in the corners near the cockpit. Luckily we had 2 buckets and we set one at each corner so that every time the boat slid to port or starboard, the water that had collected up top, slid off of the awning and into a bucket instead of poring all over the cockpit cushions.


What a wild weekend! Our trip down to the boat took an hour longer thanks to the holiday traffic, and then a huge storm kicked up while we were anchored in the bay in Annapolis for the fireworks. During the storm we watched the masts on the smaller mono hulls sway back and forth like metronomes and witnessed many boats drift and slam into each other. I have no idea what kind of insults one mono hull must have been hurling at the others because it was hit by 2 other boats before the fracas ended. The owners of the name caller, who had been on shore throughout all of this, and didn't arrive back until late into the night, must have had quite a surprise when they discovered all the damage.


Our 'awning' had to be taken down very quickly before it could be ripped to shreds with the gusting winds. Luckily our anchor held firmly (not like last month but that's a whole different story that I haven't blogged about!) and when the fireworks finally started, the storm had cleared, many boats were gone, and we had a great time.

But the real kicker was this:


On Sunday after emptying the boat and filling the car for the ride home (what a sweaty PITA that is!) Hans went into the port berth to store our new 'awning' and was astonished to find: THE NEVER USED AWNING THAT CAME WITH THE BOAT!!!!!

Honest to God! How on earth anyone missed it is beyond me. We sleep in the starboard berth but Scotty and Frank used the port berth on our wet and wild trip from Mass to Md in May. We also opened all the closets and doors (or so I thought) and no one ever saw the blue canvas bag holding a custom made, blue canvas awning, sitting right there on a shelf. Do you have any idea how much better the trip from hell would have been if we'd had that awning????!!!!! We had even emailed the previous owner about it but never got an answer and we were thiiiis close to ordering a new one and they are not cheap!!!


Hans swears that it wasn't there before and that Miss Kitty must have been hiding it from us and only just now decided we were worthy of using it.

As far as I'm concerned we just won a $2,000 lottery.

2 comments:

Mary Witzl said...

I love the fact that you have rigged your laundry up on your boat -- and that you don't care whether anyone thinks it's low rent or not. I would not survive for very long in one of those fancy communities where your paint has to be a certain color and you're not allowed to air your laundry or bedding. Nothing cheers me up more than laundry flapping about on a clothesline. Or a boat, for that matter -- I'm sure it's the same thing!

laura said...

I love laundry on a line too! I used cloth diapers on my middle daughter and in the summer I would hang them out to dry. I felt just like Ma Ingalls. Now that we've found our awning, I have a feeling I'm going to find a way to hang laundry in a more efficient way!