Closed for the Season

After a great run down the Chesapeake and some time on the ICW, we arrived at our home marina near Oriental, NC, and tucked Tilia in for the winter. That job involved a deep clean (mold sneaks in everywhere in the marine environment!), servicing the heat exchanger in the port engine, changing oil, and inventorying our food and supplies. North Carolina is a great place for our home marina for many reasons, one of which is that we don’t need to haul the boat or winterize it – the winters stay just warm enough that we don’t need to worry about systems freezing.

This concluded a season of work on the boat in the NC heat, a run up to Long Island with friends, some nice cruising on the Naragansett with visits from family, and some good sailing along the way.

We will spend the winter in Minneapolis (reverse snowbirds?) this year. Rather than heading south for a few months, we are going to spend the time settling into our new townhome, and Anne will work a lot of clinical weeks to free up our summer and fall. Our plan remains to head across the Atlantic in May! We do have a couple more things to do to prepare Tilia and ourselves for the trip:

• Jim will return to NC at some point in the next month or two to ensure proper installation of our new canvas enclosure for the cockpit. Our current enclosure is original to the boat (2015) and is worn
• This spring, we may have the standing rigging replaced. We will have this done by pros, probably in Charleston.
• We are in the process of recruiting crew for various legs of our crossing. While we could make the trip alone (the longest leg is 14 days), it will be much more pleasant to have crew to share the experience — and the watches!
• Anne is enrolled in a NOLS course, Wildnerness Upgrade for Medical Professionals, which will be held in Joshua Tree in January. When we are mid-Atlantic, we can expect a 1-2 day wait for help in any emergency, so it’s important to be as prepared as possible for any unanticipated events.

Some memories from the season…