Rollicking! ! ! ! ! ! !

SHIP'S LOG:

It has been a rollicking day down here in Daytona! This morning at sunrise, there was barely a stirring in the air. By 8am, the wind had cranked up to a solid 25 and remained there all morning. During the afternoon, it got up as high as 30. Now these aren't especially "terrible" numbers, but in the shallow water of this anchorage, such "breezes" do set up a nasty chop. It is tough to put anything down and have it remain in place and if a liquid, to remain un-spilt. It does not appear that it will die down all that much tonight as this wind is the harbinger of a front that will move through later tonight insuring, according to the boys and girls at NOAA, that it will be another one of those days. You know, rain, thunderstorms, hail, high winds, possible tornadoes. Right now, it is making snow sound good.

I replaced the final hinge on the doors to the windlass locker. All four of them gave up the ghost on this trip and have had to be replaced It is a weird item to break in the first place but to have all four of them go in the space of a few months is hard to believe. But believe it or not, they all went and, even stranger, I had replacements available in my "What not" locker. With all the other odd items located there in, the prospect of more "weird" replacements in the future is not fun to contemplate.

I am starting to think in terms of fall. It is as though I have gone through my "summer" and am now approaching the end and what "should" be ahead is fall. But actually, it is SPRING! I think my biological clock is going to go a bit off in the weeks ahead.

For a few weeks now, I have been trying to locate the source of a tapping that seems to come in the early evening. It is as though there is a "mad" woodpecker tapping away somewhere. Y p until today, I have only heard it at night and I have actually conducts hunts to try and locate the source of the noise. I narrowed it down to the port side of the boat near or around the engine somewhere, but couldn't get any closer than that . . . . until today. I was sitting up in the cockpit reading when I heard it and it was right next to me. I looked down and it turned out to be a unsnapped metal snap on the dodge. The wind was causing it to "tap" against the retaining stud. Well that's one "mystery" solved, a 1,000 more to go.