Christmas Eve

I'm embarrassed to see that I haven't posted anything since July when we returned from Canada.  We are alive and all is well.  We are currently in the middle of the Pacific Northwest Winter as it is Christmas Eve and even though the solstice has passed we still have pretty short days with about 8 1/2 hours of daylight. We have continued to work on long term maintenance items and upgrades on the boat.  I finally finished getting hoses, belts, pump impellers and so forth done on all of the diesel engines when I completed work on the generator last week.  The wing engine has gone from being somewhat hard starting with lots of vibration to easy starting and smooth running now that I've cleaned its injectors and reset the valve gaps.  Jarvis continues to be a happy boat dog as long as we don't turn the boat around - we have a gang plank on the starboard side that makes it easier for him to get aboard and he is used to it.  When we had the boat turned around so that the port side was next to the dock (we do this when we need to work on that side) he misjudged the gap at least twice and ended up in the water.  We have procrastinated all summer about sanding and varnishing the teak on the bow (the rest of the boat looks good).  We finally did the job late fall and it really went quickly and was not a big deal.  The only issue was that our dry weather window closed and our final layer of varnish on one side got rained on before it had set.  Clarice has read up and learned that it should provide protection for the wood over the winter and then in the spring we should just need to do a light sanding and redo one layer of varnish.  My latest project was to put a real defrost system in for the pilot house windows.  It uses heat from the hot water circulation system and should be a real asset on moist mornings.  Our fun for the season was winning the Port of Everett decoration contest by turning Salish Aire into Rudolf the Red Nosed Nordhavn.   Clarice again decorated the inside of the boat by putting a lighted garland around the salon and hanging our ornament collection from it.  I talked her into letting me purchase a very nautical oil lamp to go over the table to finish our old fashioned boat look.  We have weathered a couple of significant wind storms already this year in our slip and have been hit by rain storm after rain storm so that the Snohomish River where our marina is located has been running near or over flood stage for several weeks (we are more affected by the tide than the river flow where we are moored).   In an interesting turn of events - our very close friends of many years, John and Laurie, returned from 9 months doing the American Great Loop in a Ranger 29 only to return to their house and realize that they didn't need all of that room.  They have sold the Ranger 29 and moved onto a Kady Krogen 39 and are moored directly off our bow across the fairway from us. Tonight we (I) am hoping for the chance of snow to turn into a very very rare Puget Sound lowlands White Christmas.