Musings from Hammond on Sunday

It is hard to pack when you know that temperatures can easily be somewhere between 40F (god forbid lower) and 80F, but that's what I had to try to do.  When I go down to the BVI for a week, Vickie always teases me about bringing along way more that I can use in a week, but I remind her that I can be a sloppy eater (drinker, too?) and need to have more than one of everything.

In this case, it is just the wide temperature range that caused me to bring along so much still facing the challenge that I would have a limited amount of storage aboard.

Vickie and I (and Dougal, of course) had a nice ride over to Hammond Municipal Marina and we met the Captain (John Kwak) and other crewmember (Chuck Stuart).  John (and the boat) is from the Hudson River Valley in New York and Chuck is a fellow West Michigander with a Catalina 36 also in Muskegon Lake.

I got settled in and managed to squeeze all my my miscellaneous small bags (the ONLY way to pack for a boat) into the allotted space between my crew bunk in the main saloon and the outside hull of the boat.

The boat is very, very nice and while we won't be doing any sailing on this trip (mast is being shipped to Mobile), we have very comfortable accommodations.  I'll post pictures of the inside on a later entry.

A few notable things about Sunday night.  We decided that we would do more grocery shopping later in the week and go out Sunday night.  Since we were right alongside the Horseshoe Casino and they reportedly had a very good steakhouse, we elected to walk over there.  On the way, we met fellow boaters heading back to the marina and asked directions.

"Well, you just walk through the casino and when you come to the area where all the Chinese are chain-smoking, you take the nearest escalator upstairs"  I never did see the multitudes of Mandarin-speaking addicts, but we found the steakhouse nevertheless.

We also found that, while we enjoyed the meal, it was very spendy!!  We blew quite a bit of our grocery money on food the first night and have been making a financial recovery in the next few days.

We knew that we were in for a major treat in the night sky and weren't disappointed - or at least too much!

The moon rose and, true to predictions, was 14% larger than normal in a clear Chicago evening.  So (silly me) I assumed that the blood moon/eclipse to happen later in the evening was going to be spectacular.  While we did catch some glimpses during the time it took to cover and uncover, high clouds obscured to best show.

Except when we looked at what was visible with Captain John's new stabilized fancy binoculars.  Using these we could even see the orange tine in the obscured area and moon craters in the bright area!

We turned in fairly early anticipating a fairly long day on Monday.