me to say egg-citing, didn't you?) trip. OK, technically, while there were some pulse-pounding moments, it
wasn't THAT egg-citing (I can't disappoint my loyal fans, can I?).
We had decided weeks ago that we WERE going to get out of the slip in April. Both February and March had
promised sailing days, but between rotten weather and diving classes, we had missed every weekend. Since
Frank works in an industry that shuts down on Good Friday, we would be able to prep the boat on Friday and
catch the early tide out on Saturday. Initially, we had talked about sailing down river and spending the night
at a marina, but somewhere along the line, the decision had shifted to anchoring out. Ken would not be
along with us, since he was spending Easter with his grandparents. Therefore, we decided to go minimalist
and see what happened if we were on the hook one night.
Preparations were made well into the evening on Friday and we crashed heavily into bed about 9:00 - well,
Suzanne crashed heavily. Frank was awake most of the night, worrying about potential issues.
We had only spent the night on the hook one time before, on the first night we owned Rockhopper. On that
night, we decided to close up the boat, fire up the generator and watch television in the air conditioned
comfort. What actually happened is the generator ran for about ten minutes, made a loud bang and shut
down in a cloud of smoke. We spent the rest of the night, lying in the dark, worrying about the batteries - a
very unknown property at that point. Of course, in a situation like this, every drip becomes a torrent, every
creak becomes a dismasting and every rock of the boat is the stealthy step of an intruder. Frank spent the last
three hours of the night in the cockpit, watching the anchor light and listening for the sound of a speeding
power boat. None came and we survived.
This trip would be different. For one thing, we had a new gas-powered generator. Of course, it refused to run
Friday, but we decided that was because of "bad gas." We stocked up on a fresh five gallons and figured
we'd clean it out when we got underway - (note: this was probably not helping Frank's sleep patterns).
