Update from Honeymoon Bay

Happy New Year... late.

I find it difficult to blog once we get into the swing of our work months.  I forget that a lot of you still want to read about our everyday life during this time as well.  To me it seems, "same old same old" but I guess it's still different from a life on land.

November:  One stormy night a boat drug down on us in a squall with up to 50 knots of wind, it wound up getting pinned to our bow with our mooring line between its keel and rudder where it pounded our bow and bow pulpit for about 20 minutes in breaking waves of 4 to 6 feet.  Our buddy Christian was anchored out next to us and in the middle of the squall he came over in his dingy to help us but was thrown end over end by one of the breaking waves... his dingy was upside down floating away and he scrambled aboard our little hard dingy and continued to try to help us even as his own situation was perilous.  In the end, once the wind stopped and the waves died down we freed the ofending sailboat from our bow and rafted it to us for the rest of the night, Christian was ok but a little beat up and we recovered his dingy and almost all of the gear that had been set free when she was tumbled upside down.  A couple of guys from another boat got out of bed right then (1:00am) and proceeded to take Christian's dingy engine, which was almost new, appart and rinse it in fresh water, drain it and refuel it and it started right up in the morning.  Our bow pulpit will need to be rebuilt and we will probably never see a dime from the owner of the boat that dragged that night but it sure could have been worse.

December:  Benny's Birthday on the 4th... Kristofer's Birthday on the 19th, Christmas, Kaleb's birthday on the 27th, Our 21st wedding Annaversary on the 31st....  Wow it's a hard month on our pocketbook but we had a great one and our little Christmas Tree had plenty of fun stuff under it on Christmas Morning.  (A different boat dragged down on us Christmas morning too hehehe)

January:  Kristofer and Jimmy delivery with Dick Shirley onboard his sailing vessel "Changin' Tags" from COLD and snowy Norfolk, VA to St Thomas.  We zipped along the rum line to St Thomas with the help of NW winds blowing at Gale Force for seven days.  It calmed down to 30 knots for most of the rest of the trip and we ended up doing a record (for us) 9 day trip.  We also had a passenger along on that delivery, a bona fide movie star named Patrick Houser best known for his 1984 T and A flick "Hot Dog The Movie."  He was alomng for the ride and boy did he get one but he ended up standing watch for a lot of the trip and was a great hand to have along.  It's always fun to put a liberal Californian on a small boat with no escape from a Conservative Wyomingite we had some rather heated discussions as those of you who know me can imagine.  No one was thrown overboard although I am sure Dick was considering it one night.

Today:  It has rained for the past three days and actually feels like winter to me... we have the fans off, we pull a blanket over ourselves at night, and Jimmy turned positively blue while cleaning the bottom today.  Temp: 74F ..... brrrrrrr I wore a T-shirt most of the day.  The kids all still went into the beach in the rain and Beck worked. 

If you want feel free to comment... I am more likely to blog when I get feedback sometimes I am not really sure anyone is out there paying attention to it.

God Bless,

Captain Tofer