Winthrop, MA

Monday, September 29, 2008

042-22.020 N
070-59.160 W

Ahoy from Winthrop, Massachusetts!

After looking at the weather for last weekend and our proximity to home, we decided to pull into the yacht club where a friend of ours has their boat. They have extremely reasonable dockage rates and it was very close to home. So, bright and early on Thursday we left Salem harbor and headed to Winthrop. It was a quick trip and by 10:30 we were secured to a dock at the Cottage Park Yacht Club. We spent an hour+ cleaning and unloading the boat of lots of stuff that we won't need for the remainder of the trip, and at around noon a friend of ours, Guy Rodomista, who's staying at the house drove down and picked us up.

By mid-afternoon we had everything unloaded into the house and then the garden nazi had me under her control and we were out working in the gardens. It was like we had joined an episode of Land of the Giants as the plants had gone crazy with the wet summer and no one to trim them back. The weeds had also gone wild in some new beds that we put in just before leaving. In the end we had 9 large lawn/garden bags full of bio-matter and the gardens looked much better on a macro scale. There was lots more to do, but the weather didn't let us get into them again.

For those of you who don't live in New England, one can only describe this weekend as WET. It started raining on Friday morning when a nor'easter blew through and didn't stop raining until Monday morning. On Friday the category 1 hurricane Kyle passed off-shore and dumped a ton of rain on area. Our rain gauge showed just over 4" since it started raining. Luckily Kyle passed far enough off shore that we didn't get very high winds and little damage. The same can't be said for Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, as the footage that we've seen on TV showed a lot of damage. We're a bit worried about our friends on s/v Valissa who were in the area.

Anyhow while we were home we attended several wine tastings and saw a lot of friends. And just like the garden genie didn't do his job in the gardens, the house genie fell down on the jobs too, so I had a bunch of minor repairs to do. It's funny how that works.

Tomorrow I think that we're headed to Provincetown, which is on the tip of Cape Cod. Our route will take us right over the Stellwagen Banks and hopefully we'll get in some great whale watching.

-- Geoff & Sue

For the investor: Note that I just received the following investment advice from my sister. I won't argue for or against it, but the logic seems irrefutable:

If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left. With Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left. With AIG, you would have less than $15 left. But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 cash. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. :-)

For the cruiser: There is very limited dockage at the Cottage Park Yacht Club, but it's an incredible $25! It's a great place if you're an aviation buff as it's right under the flight path for Logan. Hopefully you go to bed late and rise early. I've been told that there's a T stop nearby, so you can get into Boston fairly easily.

Log ID: 1296