The Best of Both Worlds

Thank you all for weighing in on yesterday’s Life of Dilemma post. Todd and I talked some more about it last night, and I think we’re going to do both. Kind of. Our vacation starts on Saturday 23 August, and ends on Monday 1 September. We have 10 days to play with, and there is a lot that he and I can do in 10 days.

We decided to bail on the Block Island plan. As much as we love Block, and as sad as it is that we haven’t been there for 2 years, there’s simply too much to do so that we can make that trip happen.

1. Our diesel engine eats fan belts. We don’t know why. Every mechanic we’ve spoken to doesn’t know why. The last thing we want is to be so many miles from shore and have our fan belt bite it. The stress that possibility produces would outweigh any relaxation benefit we’d get from being on Block for an entire week.
2. We don’t have any chain on our anchor. On Block Island there is a gimondo anchorage. Which is great, because anchoring is free. But if you’re us it’s not as happy of a thing. We do not have chain on our anchor at the moment, because while chain does wonders for helping to keep the boat where we left it, it’s impossibly heavy to lift by hand. And while we have a new anchor windlass in a box, we don’t have the time it would take to install it before the trip. Anchoring with a rope as the anchor line would also cause more stress than it would relieve, as we would constantly wonder if our boat will be where we left it.
   
   

At the moment our solution is to be on the boat for 5 of the 10 days. There are still plenty of places in Narragansett Bay that we haven’t been: Dutch Harbor, Allen Harbor, Westerly, etc.

Then for the other 5 days we’ll dive in some places we’ve never been. We’ll camp, we’ll hike, we’ll swim and all around rock out.