Snow and Cold

I’ve had a few people comment that I have been neglecting the blog lately. They are right. Here’s a quick update.

I was able to get to the boat yesterday for the first time since before Christmas. Sharlene and I caught Covid and have been in isolation for the last week. (Our Christmas with Covid story is a post all on its own. Maybe I’ll write about it. We’ll see.) Meanwhile, we’re both on the mend. We felt pretty bad for a couple of days but each day is getting better now. Thankfully we were both fully vaccinated so our illness was not severe.

We had snow and unusually cold temperatures over the past week. The temperature didn’t get above freezing for about a week. We are not used to such cold temperatures here on the island.

We don’t winterize our boat. We leave water in our tanks all year and rely on a couple of portable heaters to keep things from freezing. I checked on the boat few days before Christmas and made sure the heaters were running and everything looked okay for the forecasted cold weather. When I left Cambria I assumed I’d return every few days during the cold snap to make sure everything was okay. I didn’t imagine it would be 10 days before I could get back.

Arriving at the Marina I was surprised to see so much ice in the bay. Salt water isn’t supposed to freeze but there is a freshwater creek that empties into the bay right at the marina. It makes for a thin layer of mostly freshwater that floats on top of the salt water. It was this layer of water that was frozen. The ice was thickest close to shore and close to the creek mouth. Cambria is on one of the outer docks. There was some ice around her but not as much as the boats close to shore.

Cambria was fine. There was some snow on the decks and even a few icicles but down below things were warm and dry. The heaters had kept the air moving and temperatures above freezing so all was well.

Now we just need the weather to warm up so we can get back out there!