Winter Harbor May 25 -May 30

Friday, May, 25- Wed. May 30th

Brewerton, NY

We arrived at Winter Harbor around 4:15 just to checkout the boat. We haven’t seen her for seven months and we missed her.  She was out of the building that had been her winter home and was sitting outside on stand for the last three weeks.  It was good to see her, but she was really dirty.  When we got to Rockford, we bought a used 4×6 trailer to haul everything around in the fall and winter months.  We dropped off the trailer at the marina so we wouldn’t have to haul it around before we moved onto the boat.

We left Winter Harbor and immediately drove over to Brewerton Boatyard to say hello to our friends there and to ask if we could borrow a scaffold to use to buff the sides of the boat.

It was good to see Wayne and Helen again.  Dan, Wayne’s brother that worked there last year,  won’t be working there this summer.  His wife Rita has breast cancer and they are staying in Raleigh North Carolina to get her chemo and radiation treatments.  Ed, the main mechanic that was there last year had a heart attack and didn’t want to work any more so Wayne hired Toni, a younger guy, to help him out.

After we set up plans at the boat yard we drove around 50 minutes to Otisco lake.  This is a summer camp that my sister Pat and her husband Tom bought over 40 years ago.  It was wonderful having it so close to the boat and it became our hotel for the next 6 nights.  Pat was still in Illinois, but Tom was there and it was good to see him again.

For the next 5 days we would drive to the boat, and work on getting her ready to put in the water.  John reinstalled two rebuilt alternators, hooked up and charged the batteries and got the engines ready.  He also buffed and waxed the side of the boat on the scaffolding that we borrowed.  I ran errands and got supplies to help him.  The marina was crazy putting boats in the water and there was never much room on the docks for boats to sit so John didn’t push them to launch our boat right away.  There were 2 other boats sitting in front of us anyway. It was supposed to go in on Tuesday, but it didn’t happen until Thursday.

On Sunday, we met our friends, Becky and Mark Mather from Mara Beel in Utica NY.  Their boat was in a marina on the Hudson but they rented a car and we met about 1/2 way across the state and stayed at a hotel and visited with them.  We hadn’t seen them since November so it was great to touch base and spend time together. On Wednesday, our friends Jane and Al from InSpeyered 2 drove in to see their boat.  That evening we went to their motel for free drinks and appetizers.

The next morning we packed up all of our stuff at the camp and went to Winter Harbor to watch the boat be launched.