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Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

How many people you bet turn up with COVID next week?

Rumor is that they serve breakfast here at Lake Bay on weekends.  So Dave heads up to the restaurant – sure enough breakfast sandwiches that he brings back to the boat.  Yumo.

After breakfast – at high tide so we don’t have to worry about hitting ground on the way out of here – we start out for Cutts Island.  Upon anchoring there we realize it’s a party cove.  There are 50 boats and hundreds of people in all directions.

We took the dingy over to a small market so we could get a few provisions.  No one but the store owner (and us) are wearing masks.  The teen agers pull their t-shirts up over their faces when they see us.  Sigh.

Dave wanders around in the dingy chatting with people aboard the boats.  He is amazed how friendly everyone is.  Much friendlier here in South Sound than we have experienced in the San Juan Islands.  He makes his way over to a small cluster of boats all flying big Trump flags.  It is so rare here in Seattle he is curious.  They ask what everyone asks – which boat is he from?  He points over at Apsaras, where we are proudly flying our new big US flag.

They naturally assume we are Trump supporters and decide he must have a Trump flag to go with our US flag.  An argument now breaks out between the boats because one of the boats the wife wants to get rid of the flag and the husband is like “no way”.  Dave says “I’m not getting in the middle of this” and heads back to Apsaras.

A few minutes later one of the guys comes over from the Trump boats with a flag they found that they were not using.  Dave gracefully accepts the flag.  Now what to do?  Melissa rolls her eyes, and tells Dave if he puts it up we are going to be disowned by everyone we know.  None the less Dave decides to put it up.  Alas when he goes to put it up, the eyelet pulls out of the flag and the halyard shoots up out of reach.  For those that don’t know sailboats – the halyard is a rope that hangs from the top of the mast.  There is now no way to retrieve the rope and pull it back down to the deck without climbing the mast.  But the only way to climb the mast is on a halyard.  We have two halyards for this reason among others.  However, only one of the two halyards is rigged such that Melissa can pull Dave up the mast via the power wench.  This means Dave has to hand-to-hand actually climb up the halyard.  To give you a taste of what this is like:

So Dave (agonizingly) climbs the mast, albiet not very high, to retrieve the halyard.  Melissa says, “yup, what you get for trying to fly a Trump flag”.

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