25 Jul 13

Up early-ish, to catch the flood tide north on the ICW to Fernandina Beach. This is supposed to be a narrow, challenging pilot, but was a piece of cake; Active Captain kept us off the bottom the whole way. We picked up a mooring ball at Fernandina Harbor Marina about noon and went into town for a stroll. Seriously hot, humid and still, so we kept to the shadows. The old historic district is quaint, if a bit touristy, but very pleasant just the same. We came back to the boat to have G&T’s and clean up before dinner, but I got started on the replacement of the last of the running rigging (the main halyard and main furling line), which, of course, turned into a bit of a struggle, so we ended up having dinner aboard. The main halyard was no big deal, but the main furling screw has to be completely removed from the mast to get to the dead-end knot at the end of the furling line; I had never done this before, so it took a while to figure out and then one of the flat-head machine screws holding the assembly into the mast was completely seized and I stripped it out trying to free it: damn! We re-hoisted the main and decided to think about the furling gear some more. Whilst raising the main, since the current and wind were (naturally) in opposition to each other, we sailed over the mooring ball and somehow managed to get it stuck behind the keel, so we had to let go the mooring pennants, winkle the mooring ball out from under the boat and then tie up again. About dark, the mosquitos launched a multi-front full-scale surprise attack. It took us an hour to seal all the hatches, find the leaks and kill the 30 or 40 enemy combatants that were already inside the perimeter. We suffered horrendous casualties during the opening stages of this heinous, unprovoked attack (a night that will live in infamy): Terri and I lost about 1.5 pints between us in the process and had to apply a whole tube of Benadryl to stop the itching. Ran the generator for an hour so we could cool the boat off a bit with the A/C before bed-time.

26 Jul 13

Slept in until it got too hot to stay in bed. We then went into town and spent the morning and early afternoon in a coffee shop, keeping cool, reading and doing a little planning for the next legs of our trip. I talked to the good folks at U.S. Spars and got the low-down on the furling gear and also ordered a spare machine screw to replace the one I had stripped out ($1.00 worth of parts and $12.00 for the shipping). We then toured the Amelia Historical Museum and Terri had a hair cut (or whatever it is that ladies do at the hair dresser’s). Back on the boat, we dropped the main, flaked it very nicely on the boom, removed the furling gear successfully, drilled out the seized machine screw, and - you could see this one coming, I’m sure - buggered up the threads on the static piece; now I will have to re-tap the hole and get a bigger screw: damn! Dinner aboard with leftovers from last night. We got inside before the mosquitos returned. It was way too hot, even after dark, so we started up the genny again so we could run the A/C. After about 45 minutes, the genny made a funny sound and stopped putting out voltage; i.e., no A/C. I could not figure out what the problem was, although I think it just overheated, so we gave up and went to bed a bit warm. Fortunately, the tide turned about 22:30 and swung us round head to wind, so we got a bit of air-flow through the boat and managed to get to sleep.