Catching up with Friends and Family (and boat maintenance)

[Kyle]After Maryanne’s contract ended, and before Kyle was due to retire, we decided to make the most of our travel benefits and visit as many friends and family as possible. All the visits were shorter that we’d originally hoped, but it was a fun time.

We spent time together in Virginia, Rhode Island, Arizona and even The Dominican Republic, and Maryanne set off to New York and the UK while Kyle was working to get some quality time with family and friends there.

A small selection of the funtimes we had catching up with friends and family - every photo here deserves a blog post of its own (as do many that are not posted here) - it was a fun time

Before all this fun, we also needed to check one more time on our new rudders after discovering issues on the prior haul out. Any haul out is so inconvenient and expensive, we make the most of it and plan 101 little jobs at the same time. The rudders, it seems (yes, the new ones we installed in Hawaii), are not in a good state. The manufacturer offered us about a 3% refund which so far we’ve been too disgusted to respond. Did I mention haul outs are expensive? During this haul out we decided to do some of the work ourselves that we’d contracted to the yard (to avoid extra days stuck in the yard over a weekend). When the bill came there was one odd charge for parts that we didn’t recognize and Maryanne sent an email to clarify that – they responded (amazingly) by correcting that error, and also refunding us the extra hours that their workers didn’t need to do on the boat (we were not expecting that! Yay!!!).

Haul out and new solar panels

On another positive note, around this time (back at the marina) we also managed to install additional (flexible) solar panels which along with all our low consumption systems, should mean we never have to worry about power aboard. Kyle was amazed at how wonderfully Maryanne was able to sew large masses of heavy fabric from within the cockpit on an ancient sewing machine. {Maryanne}And I was impressed how readily Kyle installed the mass of extra electronics and wiring required to actually get them working.

On the journey to and from the yard, we spent a couple of days to anchor out and sail about – we were really lucky to hang out for a few of hours with a family of humpback whales around the golden gate bridge – quite special. We will always have fond memories of Bay Area sailing.

Fun again - Sailing in the Bay with Whales aplenty