Spiders’ Webs and Marinas

We’re off. Well, not off, off but our summer cruising season has begun. We’re getting started about six weeks later than I thought we would, but that’s pretty normal. Boaters usually underestimate how long it will take them to finish off their to-do list. (Even thinking one can finish a to-do list is ridiculous.)

We also fell into the, “We can’t go until we finish x, y and z” trap. We kept telling ourselves that we’d go when the watermaker was fixed or we’d go when we finished sanding and staining the toe rail because it should have been done in the spring.

The to-do list on a boat is never completed. It’s a good day when we cross as many things off the list as we add to it. It’s an amazing day if we can actually cross more things off the list than we added. Those days are few and far between.

Our plan had been to spend a few weeks doing boat projects and then spend the rest of the summer sailing. We have lots of projects but most of them can wait until the winter when it’s cold and damp, when we don’t feel like cruising.

Our daughter had two weeks off work which gave us a hard deadline, so we finally untied the lines and left the dock. Not everything was as we wanted it, but it never will be–that’s the nature of owning a boat. It was a warm afternoon when we slipped the lines and headed out from our marina. We didn’t go far but at least we were away.

As I dropped the anchor at one of our favourite anchorages, I noticed a spider had spun its web over our anchor. Obviously, we had been in the marina far too long if a spider had decided our anchor was a safe place for its web. We’ll do our best not to let that happen again.