The weekend after my high school reunion, I went down to Essex with my friend Chex. He wanted to check out the recently repaired GPS system in his brother's boat before he shipped it overseas to him.
The boat was stored in a warehouse like this one at the Sunset Harbor Marina. He had no problems getting the boat out. I was really impressed with the friendliness of the guy who loaded the boat into the water.
Here's the boat on its way to the water. Well, and Chex on his way to the boat.
Here's a better picture of the boat being lowered into the water.
The forklift had solid white rubber tires. Odd huh?
A beach, of sorts, with boats parked next to it.
We were leaving just as these people were getting back. Yeah, we kind of got a late start. Those people were very nice and friendly, too.
So this is the cabin inside the boat. Longtime readers may recall that we took Chex's brother's old boat out into the bay, too. This boat is much bigger than that one and the cabin is much, much nicer. The weather was a lot warmer on the last trip, however!
You could, if you wanted to, live in this one. It's got a bathroom, with a shower, and a kitchen. It's also got a stereo system, shown here, and a flat panel TV on the other side, which I forgot to take a picture of. Oops!
Here is Chex, enjoying his brother's boat!
Off we go, no wake behind us.
Eventually we turned the engines on . . . but we didn't set any speed records getting anywhere. Most of the time we were trying to figure out where we were since the GPS system was still not working. We still had the basic GPS on the boat and we also had my own Garmin handheld GPS.
We had ambitions of reaching Annapolis, but there was no way that was going to happen. We set off way too late and like I said, weren't really sure where we were going. Eventually, though, we did get into a position where we could see, way off in the distance, the Bay Bridge. We probably could have made Annapolis before dark, but then we would have had to sail back in the dark, and neither of us was game for that.
Most of the trip we spent looking for buoys like this one and trying to guess which way the next one was that we needed to find. I got a lot of practice reading the navigation charts Chex had bought. It didn't help that one of them, believe it or not, was wrong. It had the wrong coordinates. That really messed me up for a while until I figured out that it had to be wrong.
So with daylight on it's way out, we headed back to the marina. The bad news for these gulls is that we were not fishing.
We paused briefly before returning the boat to the dock, so I took this picture of some ducks, which wisely gave us a wide berth.
Here we are almost to the dock. These are the fronts of the boats that are parked at the beach. We made it back in one piece once again. I hope his brother is enjoying his new boat! If he keeps this up, maybe next time he'll buy one we can just sail to him!
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Category: Life
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