No Rest For The Weary

South Burlington, VT

(8/29/05) Sigh. After writing the "Tuckered Out" article the other night, little did I know that there would be no rest for me that night. The nice anchorage I picked out sheltered from a south wind, turned out to be terribly exposed to a southwest wind.

Around 2300 the wind picked up from zero to 25 knots. Around midnight I sensed that the anchor was dragging. I had to wake Libby and get out of there in a hurry. We pulled anchor. It came up all covered with weeds. The weeds were what caused it to drag.

I thought that the simplest thing to do in the middle of the night was to pick up an unused mooring nearby. We didn't have permission to use the moorings but in the middle of the night there is little chance that the owner will appear. However actually doing it in the face of 25 knot winds proved to be very difficult. Tarwathie needs speed to steer, but one has to stop to pick up the mooring pennant. Every time I did that Tarwathie's nose blew away from the wind and we either missed the pickup or had it snatched out of our hands by the force of the wind on the boat. We tried and failed 4 times.

Tarwathie is much bigger and heavier than any boat I've every owned. It is futile to try to use muscle to hold the boat against wind or waves.

We gave up and we sailed up the bay to a more sheltered spot. When we got there, it was too full of boats to approach in the dark. Back to the mooring spot. We tried the fifth time and succeeded. I sat up the rest of the night making sure we didn't drag again.

Sunday we went to Burlington to leave the boat for a few days to visit Jenny and take care of business. The winds were still fierce and it took us three tries to catch the mooring pendant at Burlington.

Oh well. The point of our new life style is adventure. Midnight Chinese fire drills are adventure. It could have been worse. If we had continued with our original plan to do the great loop, we might have been meeting Hurricane Katrina later this week in Lake Superior. It never occurred to me to worry about hurricanes while sailing on lakes.

We are almost out of cash because of government requirements and bureaucracy. To withdraw money from my IRA the broker requires that I fill out a government form. It has to be on paper, no electronic submissions allowed. A month ago, we did that and sent it off. After several weeks, nothing happened. We called the broker and he said we forgot to include a voided check with the form, so they ignored it. The fine print in the form tells you to include the voided check even if you filled out all the blanks with bank and account number info. Flame!

We send a second form with a voided check last week. Still no money. Today on the phone with the broker, we found that we sent it to the TD Waterhouse address shown on the front of the form rather than the address listed on the bottom of page 2. There is no way to tell how much delay that may cause, perhaps infinite. Flame! Flame!

So that we can pay our bills next week, I'm going to have to drive from Burlington down to Albany tomorrow to make a withdrawal in person. Then drive back to Burlington. Seven hours on the road and needless depletion of our oil reserves. Flame! Flame! Flame! There's a chance that when I arrive in their office that I'll find that the transaction cleared overnight and that the whole trip was unnecessary. If that happens, I'll have words stronger than flame.