The pandemic is officially over. The proof is that Rick and I have taken off on a new sailing adventure, this time for four months over the summer and early fall. We plan to sail to Maine and back like we have done a number of times before, but for this trip take our time doing it, returning to Baltimore sometime in October.
There were no boating excursions during 2020, at least for us. The marina was closed and we couldn’t get to our boat to do the usual maintenance and repairs, let alone have the boat put into the water. Besides, there was nowhere to go: any extensive sailing trip includes stopping at marinas for fuel and water, and like our own marina, they were all closed. So we spent that first pandemic year in our house, taking walks, streaming movies and being hermits like everyone else.
Since then, we've taken Valkyrie on a few short trips, but nothing major. Rick added a new under-decks self-steering system to the boat, and struggled with the installation all of last summer. We finally took off in the last week of September for a short jaunt in the lower Chesapeake, but it rained for almost the entire two weeks. It’s been four years since we’ve taken the boat all the way up to Maine, and boats don’t do that well just sitting on the hard, unused. There was a lot of preparation necessary this year before we could take off on a long excursion.
We cleaned and polished the hull, washed the deck, oiled the teak, refinished some of the woodwork, repaired the toe-rail, washed, waterproofed and repaired the boat canvas, and repainted the bottom, all before putting the boat in the water.
 |
| Just for comparison, Rick's dear friend Tim launched his 28' Triton the day before we went in. Valkyrie is 35'. (Not that size matters of course. 😁) |
Then there was the provisioning. Several trips to buy bags and bags of nonperishables, canned goods and the like, loading on clothes, personal items, etc. I don’t know how we managed to fit it all into the boat. We flushed the water tanks , and filled the water jugs with drinking water.
Something new this year; ants. They have apparently taken advantage of the boat being on the hard for so long, and they have moved in! I had to use Terro ant killer which they love to eat and carry back to their nest to kill everyone else, and I feel badly for them. (But not THAT badly…)
Our dinghy has been hanging out on our back patio for the past year, and we kept forgetting that she wouldn’t just be magically transported down to the boat somehow. Once Valkyrie was basically ready to go, we couldn’t put off dealing with her any longer. So we rented a UHaul truck and our son Dewey helped load her in. The mid-Atlantic had been in a drought for many weeks at this point, and rain was finally on the way, but - welcome though it was - it came one day earlier than expected and doused our moving day. Of course it did.
 |
| 10' truck wasn't big enough for the 10' dinghy. Ricky and rope to the rescue. |
 |
| Aaaaand then the battery in the truck died so we had to jump it. |
The target date for our departure was in early June, but as usual, we fell way behind. The silver lining was that we had lots of extra evenings to spend with Dewey, cooking, playing games, watching movies and having fun together, before he begins his solo stretch of housesitting for us. I think he might prefer that we don’t go at all, but the day does finally arrive and we are ready to go.
We loaded in an embarrassing amount of perishable groceries, optimistic that our refrigeration system will work, and a multitude of bags of stuff we had previously forgotten. In the midst of our loading frenzy, Rick’s brother Jim arrived for a visit, bringing bon voyage gifts of beer, cheeses, assorted crackers and a beautiful orchid. Not sure what her name will be, but she joins our other plant (Hermie). Believe it or not, Jim gave us that little guy a number of voyages ago, and he's still with us.
By the time we’re done with stowing everything away, putting on the sails, and doing all the last minute preparations, the sun is on its way down. Neither one of us wants to spend the night in the slip - too demoralizing after we were so determined to leave today - so we motored out along the Jone's Creek channel and anchored less than a mile from our marina. It’s official. We are on our way!
