4/21/15: There is a new weapon in my arsenal for the dreaded ICW bridge dance. With the cat, our ability to speed up to get to a bridge for the next opening was pretty limited. Today I made it from the North Landing Bridge to the Centerville Turnpike bridge in 1/2 hour to make the opening. 4.8 statute miles, even wide open the cat wouldn't have made it so we would have to take the next opening 1/2 hour later. Even heavily loaded in the stern, full fuel, dinghy, motor and fuel, and a cooler full of ice and drinks, the new Sunspot Baby gave us 13.5 kts over the bottom against a current. Gotta love it.

We have a generator/water pump drive belt that wants to slip a little first thing in the day. If I run up the RPM slowly it does fine and from then on doesn't slip. Still not a situation I want to have heading into the Chesapeake. I looked at it, and if we were desperate I could fix it, maybe with and extra hand from Lynn; the access is so darned limited. A longer extension for my ratchet and a little time no problem. Why I forgot to change it while we were painting the bottom, changing oil, filters and impeller prepping for the new season, I have no idea.

So we are docked at Atlantic Yacht Basin, just south of Great Bridge. Their mechanic probably won't work it until tomorrow morning so they don't have to lay on a hot engine. When we bought this boat, we promised ourselves that we would not try to do all the maintenance or carry every spare part we could fit on board. So we are having the work done. Interestingly, we do have a couple of spare belts on board.

What comes next?. We are looking at Chesapeake weather and sea conditions carefully. While we are anxious to see the Darrahs and won't spend extra time sight seeing right now, we don't plan to get beat up either. Right now the forecast for tomorrow doesn't look favorable but In addition to us we have Arne studying the data.

A note about GRIBs (Gridded Binary) data sets based on a computer generated model weather prediction.  We used them in the Bahamas but have become lazy and have fallen out of practice since we are mostly cruising local waters and not very many open stretches. Our cell phones and VHFs give us the NWS forecast and it normally gets us by fine.

I was reminded of their power when Arne so accurately predicted our weather for a very small part of the area lumped together by NWS. I said, "There ought to be an app." Guess what, there is. I tried a couple of free ones and opted for the $4.00 Pocket GRIB app. Run on my tablet, the graphics are large enough to be useful. Now I just need to get back into practice.