We're all ready...

The boat is ready. The house is ready. We've gotten everything we're going to get for departing. We just have to do a final loading of perishable foods this afternoon, top off our water tank, and disconnect the mooring pennant. The dogs know that something is up.

We plan to leave tomorrow at 8:30 am headed for Rockland, Maine to quickly top off our fuel tanks. By loading up with fuel now, we won't need fuel again until we're on the Chesapeake unless we come across a good price somewhere. We need to leave Rockland by 1:00 pm to get long past Mongehan Island by sunset. Then we'll be making a straight line from Monhegan to the Cape Cod Canal approaching Cape Cod at sunrise and entering the canal around 9:30 am. Our departure delay of a couple of days will cause us to now be against the current on the canal slowing us down significantly for those 10 miles. Once in Buzzards Bay we plan on heading to Third Beach (ActiveCaptain reference here) off the Sakonnet River to anchor for the night. We've never been on the Sakonnet River or near that anchorage before. But is has a 4 star rating by 3 captains. We especially like the comment someone made about there being a "pet friendly beach".

It's both sad and exciting to leave. We'll miss our friends, Castine, our house, long hot showers, high-speed internet, DVR, and our general routine. The dogs have a huge surprise coming when they take that dinghy ride to the boat expecting a fun day trip only to find that they're not getting off - and not even stopping for the night. It'll certainly be a change. But we'll all be together. We'll face the challenges and share the joys of whatever comes our way.

Fair winds and following seas for all...

Downtime

We're still waiting for Bill to make his way up the east coast. The predictions here in Maine are for rains and winds to start tonight through Sunday. He's moved further east and slowed down so we're hoping the seas will settle down Monday allowing us to leave first thing Tuesday morning.

In the meantime, we're taking the final preparations a bit slower and taking some downtime with our friends. We've had some parties, big and small, and went to see the new Meryl Streep movie, Julie & Julia - Karen loved it (Jeff says "chick flick"). This afternoon we found time to give the dogs a final bath. Can anyone explain why dogs who absolutely love being in the water hate being bathed? But they smell awful sweet right now.

We were left a comment asking advice about the "poop deck" for the dogs. We have an article describing all about the technique we used. Check out Canine Crew on the web site. If you'd like a reply to your comment, please make sure you leave us your email address!

Curses to Bill!

Hurricane Bill is churning up the waters off the east coast so we have postponed our Friday departure. There's even a possibility it could hit here in Castine. We're considering putting aCappella on our storm mooring tomorrow or Friday. Our next possible departure date looks like Tuesday the 25th. So we wait, visit some more with friends, and hope he hurries his way north.