Surviving the Heat Wave

For the first day of the past week, the temperature is below 90 degrees. We're back in Rock Hall after a week of smothering heat. But a cold front has pushed through without much in the way of rain. Mesmerizing shades of pinks and oranges now blaze across the sky this sunset. What a relief!

We've worked pretty darn hard at trying to stay cool this week. It reached a high of 97.9 degrees inside the boat; some nights it only cooled down to around 90 degrees. The upper bay is still jellyfish free but climbing in the water every half hour gets weary after a while. But no matter how bad it is on us, it's got to be worse on the cats. We try to imagine what its like for them with their thick fur coat. We do what we can to help them stay cool, turning the fans on them when they're sleeping, and wiping them with cold water when they're not. But they just think we're trying to torture them. We even got so desperate one particularly hot day that we thought a dunk in the water would make them feel better. What were we thinking? Needless to say they didn't think much of it. It took them several days to forgive us.

On our way to Georgetown, we overheard a fellow sailboater radio one of the marinas asking for a slip and an air conditioner. I thought this was pretty incredulous until I heard the marina say that they have one that they could rent. Must of been the only one in town because all the other marinas laughed when we asked for one. We also met a couple who were anchored near us one night. There were returning to their boat and to Annapolis after a night's retreat at the Kitty Night House Hotel. As she put it, they had been on the boat for a week and had to get off into some air conditioning. "How long have you all been on the boat" she asked. Well................!

To keep the sun off the boat, one day we jury-rigged a white bed sheet over the cabin top. This worked so well that while in Georgetown, we had the local canvas-maker sew up a much larger version out of dacron that we can drape over the boom thus shading most of the cabin-top. We also rig our awning over the cock-pit and a windscoop in the forward hatch. The windscoop does nothing more than funnel more of the breeze down the hatch and into the boat. It works amazingly well if not a bit noisy at night. With all of this stuff rigged up, we look quite the gypsies.

We and the cats are not the only things suffering during this heat-wave. Our electronics have started acting a bit goofy as well. The display on the digital radio is getting wacky and our laptop is starting to ack weird as well.

But finally a cooler day in Rock Hall. We gave the boat and the dinghy a through cleaning, did some shopping and laundry, took a couple of nice long showers and we're starting to feel human again. Atlas even had a couple of chances to get off the boat and stretch his legs, once when he wasn't supposed to. We also found several interesting boat in the harbor; we saw the MI-T-Mo in St. Michaels last month and here it is again anchored in Rock Hall. Also, the P.E. Pruitt is one of the last of the class of Chesapeake Bay ‘buy boats', named for their role in traveling out to the waterman's work areas and bring back the catch, thus allowing the waterman to continue with the harvest.

It doesn't take long for us humans to poke fun at others (or our own) problems. For the boat name of the week, we both had a good laugh at the motor yacht named Viagra Falls, pictured here at berth in Georgetown Harbor.