Sail Fail

After several weeks of very cold weather, we are having a spell of warmer weather. I decided to go check on the boat, which I hadn't seen since sometime in November. I even had fantasies of taking her out for a sail.

This was not to be, as I'd forgotten how much more slowly water warms than air. While air temps on land may have been in the 50s, the water was still frozen and the air above it was not much warmer. I also planned on using the boat's heat pump, but it didn't work at all when its intake pipe froze. It didn't work much better unfrozen. Not too much heat to pump out of really cold water. The pipes at the bathhouse were frozen too, so no showers. It was a fairly cold and disappointing few days hanging out on the boat at the marina.

On my last day there, a couple boats tried to break through the ice to the inlet. They weren't making much progress while I was there. That's them in the photo, stuck with a couple hundred yards to go to the inlet. There was also a guy at the marina getting set to sail to the Bahamas. Seems like he's getting an awfully late start.