The Big Storm

Vergennes, VT

No LL

Monday, I revarnished the cabin floor inside Tarwathie. Since we had to let it dry for 24 hours before use, we left Tarwathie on a mooring in Burlington, then Libby and I stayed on shore at Jenny's house. Jenny even let us borrow her truck so that we could run errands. Thank you Jenny!

Late Tuesday afternoon we returned to the boat. We intended to leave and head south to Porter Bay. I went in to the boat house to pay for the mooring. While there, they showed me a radar view from weather.com. It showed a very intense thunderstorm, all red in color, coming right up the middle of the lake from the South. Somebody said that Crown Point near the Champlain Bridge was experiencing 60 knot winds. Yikes!

We changed our minds about leaving. We hurridly rowed back out to Tarwathie. Then we put the dinghy up on deck, and secured all loose things on deck in preparation for a real blow. The last time we sat out a 65 knot (75 mph) thunderstorm while at anchor it blew away our canvase sun shade in the back.

Anyhow, the end result was that I sat in the cockpit and watched the storm come north right up the middle of the lake. However, it stopped just to the west of us, so that we got only a little rain and I could still see good. Violent thunderstorms are sure scary, but they can also be very beautiful when you can see them from a distance.

This morning we returned to Vergennes. Along the way we stopped at Tom's Marine on Otter Creek. I dropped off our Honda outboard for Tom to repair. I gave up on trying to fix it myself. I had thoroughly cleaned out the carberator, and checked everything I could think of in the fuel system, but it did no good.

We are also in search of a clock repairmen in Vergennes. Our beloved ships clock that sounds the ship's bells stopped.