OCC dinner and rally

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Tue 20 Aug 2013 02:52

Sat, Sun & Mon – 17th, 18th & 19th August

 

Bit of a slow day but we got jobs done, went ashore for the wifi and farmer’s market and we also got invited by Doug & Dale Bruce to come out to their house for dinner.  So around 1730 hours we came ashore and Dale kindly picked up  Dick, Susi and us, and drove us all out to their beautiful house up in the hills behind Camden. It has a fabulous view and is all very impressive and we were joined for dinner by two other couples from Rhode Island.  It was a great evening and Doug kindly ran us back down to the harbour close to midnight!

 

On Sunday morning we chose to use the dinghy and the flat sea to clean our waterline and hull. Sarah also managed to fit in cooking a pizza to take as our contribution to the hors d’oeuvres for the OCC dinner in the late afternoon. At 1300 hours we headed ashore to help set up the tables and chairs for the OCC meeting which was followed by the splendid dinner attended by over 100 members from across the world. Things finally came to halt as the launch service was finishing for the night although we had hedged our bets and brought our dinghy.

 

Monday was a bit frustrating at first as Wayfarer Marine had promised us that their electronics man would be with us first thing, but it took three phone calls during the course of the morning before he finally appeared around 1330 hours. The news was not all good as he was able to diagnose that the fault lay in the course computer and the only course of action was to remove it and send it off to Raymarine in New Hampshire for repair. This means that we are without an autopilot and various other critical functions of our navigation system until it returns – and generally Raymarine take some 10 days or so to turn such jobs around. This has caused us to review our trip to Nova Scotia as we do not fancy undertaking this without this equipment, so we will wait to see what actually happens and rethink our plans once the system is back up and running properly and we can gauge the weather etc. 

 

We also discovered on Monday that the situation regarding renewing our visas on our return from Canada (should we still go) is less than clear. We will still have two months left from the 6 months they gave us back in May and it now appears that they are likely to refuse to issue a new 6 month one until the existing one has expired.  This is real blow as it leaves us in a difficult situation and we will have to wait for now to see what happens about Canada. If we go and are lucky enough to get new visas on our return then all is well, but the odds now are that this will not happen. We then could try to apply for an extension until the end of December, but if that fails there is finally the option in early November to sail from Virginia straight down to the Bahamas and then on to Florida and as the visas will then have expired as we leave all should be well….. what could possibly go wrong you might ask?

 

We have two through hull seacocks that have stopped working altogether and so we are now booked to haul out on Thursday in Belfast (no shortage of familiar names out here) to get them changed quickly and then splash back hopefully the same morning.

 

The best bit of Monday was the unscheduled appearance of a dinghy alongside us with Amanda and Mark (Balvenie) from NZ aboard. We have not actually met them before but it transpired that they have read parts of this blog and so knew probably too much already about us! They stopped for a coffee before continuing on their way ashore to climb up the substantial hill behind Camden.  And we also think we will now catch up with the OCC rally which set off today, to while away some of our waiting time for parts various.