Hanging out

We're laid over in Brookings because of some strong weather that's arriving and looks to last a while. So it's a good chance to remedy the few boat problems discovered on the trip so far. On Saturday night in the nasties we did an accidental jibe where the boom came flying across the cockpit and nailed me in the forehead. That was bad enough, but had I been standing, it could have put me in the water. We are now rigging a "preventer". Also found a young man to dive under the boat and replace the prop shaft zinc that was lost somehow on the way here.

Yesterday in Brookings was the first day of a very short and long awaited salmon fishing season/derby. When we walked to the laundromat in the RV park at the shore in the AM, we were treated to quite a sight. The ocean looked relatively mellow, but good sized waves were crashing to shore, and behind them, almost lined up from the bar out the channel for maybe a mile, rising and dropping in the swells were about 40 or 50 small fishing boats. It looked almost like you could have walked out the channel from boat to boat. I had been whining about the fact that what used to be a simple 5 minute chore at home had become a 2 hour chore here in our new life. Shame on me. Had we been able to just walk into the laundry room, put in the clothes, and leave, we'd have missed both this spectacular sight and meeting up with Jimmy, our bartender from Monday Night Football at the local bar, who offered us a ride back to the boat. Life is good.