East Coast Adventures

[skipgundlach]

East Coast Adventures

Greetings.

As you see, we have neither died nor fallen off the edge of the earth.
My apologies for the long silence!

We have done an enormity of stuff since our last, including seeing
grandchildren, friends and relatives on land, the usual boat chores
("It's a boat. Therefore, everything on it is broken; you just don't
know it yet!"), a massive improvement on our battery bank and solar
array, and, when in Vero Beach, involvement in the church we are
attending (and in which choir we sing, when it's active in the
snowbird season).

However, the big deal of late has been our return from a week of
post-Maria rebuilding in Juncos PR, related to our music minister's
having grown up there, as well as his father being the pastor for 30
years, before his retirement, of the church whose school we
repaired...

Our time there was filled with amazing food, prepared morning, noon
and night, by the church staff, and exhausting physical work.

Our team was nearly evenly divided into men and women, and students
(rising or graduating seniors, mostly) and adults (most of whom were
considerably on the far side of AARP eligibility).

I'll save you the technical details of all that went on there, save
one thought:

There's hope for the future...

The young adults ("kids", of course, to those in our age group)
totally restored my faith in our country's survival and continuation.
Like, I presume, our parents before us, most of the "older" adults
would have, if asked, despaired of what they have seen in younger
people. However...

I found them, to a man and woman, to be engaging and engaged,
thoughtful and thinking, helpful (what kid would give up a week of
their vacation to come do hard labor, in the hot sun, in an
environment which was "camping" at best??), considering and
considerate, intelligent and all-around good people. Unlike what
seems to be, at least to the perceptions of the "mature" generation, a
preponderance of the "entitlement mentality" in younger generations
today, this group was all about contributing, rather than taking.

If this group of young adults, only some of whom were part of a church
group (the rest being connected via Kiwanis Key Club or perhaps other
means), is in any way representative of this generation, I'd say our
future is in good hands.

Having started to catch up on our sleep, we're now into preparation
for our next adventure.

We're about to head out on an open water passage from Vero Beach
(well, technically, Ft. Pierce) FL to Portland ME. We will be in
twice-daily voice contact with our weather and routing forecaster,
over HF radio, as well as several cruisers' nets in the same fashion,
daily. As such, while we'll be offshore as much as 250 miles, we'll
also be sending log updates (only to TheFlyingPigLog as seen in my
signature block) as we go. That will be done by the magic of HF radio
and what amounts to a custom modem (which isn't any faster than the
old 14.4k dialups!) which will enable my son to paste together my
usual long-winded bloviations into a single post which will originate
from my regular email address (the email address at sea is very
different). So, my apologies, if you were waiting with bated breath for
those - they'll only show up in my log's email list.

You could, however, if you were determined enough (ETD still
undetermined, likely not for a week or so, and entirely weather
dependent), check in on our Spot Locator beacon track...

If you'd like to track our progress, you can go to (no leading www.
needed) tinyurl.com/flyingpigspotwalla - which has more retention of
data than the one directly associated with our SPOT. As such, if you
want, you can look backward at previous travel (click the down arrow
next to our name and adjust the time frame).

Our SPOT also is recorded at tinyurl.com/flyingpigspot, which is a bit
faster to update (every 10 minutes when the locator is transmitting),
but has a shorter window of available tracking information. We will
also send an "OK" report every day, which will show up on my timeline
in Facebook. Otherwise, the only way of knowing where we are or how
we're doing will be via The Flying Pig Log's mailing list.

Thanks for your interest in our adventures; I'll return to posting our travels here when we're back in internet range

Until we're at sea, Stay Tuned!

L8R

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