Reluctance

Do I look like a guy happily anticipating a swim?

Today was change-the-zinc and scrape-the-prop day. Surprisingly, the zinc was not as bad as it has been in the recent past, but the prop was a happy little colony of barnacles.

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Maybe, just maybe we have licked the problem we have had for the last few years with "hot" fittings - where the bottom paint was burned off around a couple of fittings.  I believe that this was being caused by a low-level short (that eventually graduated to a full-on fuse-blowing short) in the circulating pump for our heat pump. Could also explain why the zinc lasted better than it has in recent times.

Yes, Jane did the pour-the-hot-water-down-the-back-of-the-wetsuit trick, and as usual, it worked wonderfully.  Because I didn't want to freak myself out, I didn't check the water temp until I was done and sipping a well-earned beer...  It was 54 degrees. It felt a lot warmer than that.

The Drought Is Over

With no rain to speak of for all of June, July, August, and part of May...  things were dangerously dry in Seattle.  This is an area where normally you have to worry about moss taking over your lawn, crowding out the grass (really!).  But not this summer. 

Our yard - no moss there.  (The green traces are our drainfield runs.)

It was a wonderful summer, with clear, warm, sunny days, one after the other.  A great boating summer.  But notice that I used the past tense there...

It is no longer Summer in Seattle.  And it ended with a BANG, on Saturday, August 29. 

(Courtesy of SailFlow)

Look at those wind speeds recorded at Anacortes, where Eolian is berthed - steady winds pushing 50 mph and gusts over 60 mph!  For six straight hours.  Seattle has never, ever seen a storm like this in the summer - it was a record breaker.

Amazingly, it was well-predicted.  In fact, when all of my weather sources converged to predict damaging winds, Jane and I made an emergency run up to Anacortes with our winter fenders and second set of docklines.  Tho it felt strange to be getting ready for winter in the heat of an August day, it turned out to have been the right thing to do.

And it was a doozy.  When it was over, half a million people were without power in the Seattle area, and two had been killed by falling timber.

But it brought rain.  Glorious, glorious rain.  We have had rain on every single day since the storm, including today (9/03).  And *snap* just like that, it is now fall.

I guess I'll be getting the lawn mower out of mothballs...