"Stone Soup Today" -- a blanket invite to everyone hanging around the marina. "Stone at 5, Soup at 6" is the small print at the bottom of the sign. (Ishky Baha is Gaelic, "water of life", from which we get the English word Whiskey.)
CA was cruising the boatyard, looking at teak treatments when she came on the invitation. She figured it would be fun to run to the grocery store, grab a bunch of carrots and a few potatoes and show up. Except we have this 2 hour drive back to Norfolk. Sigh.
Once we get our rig rebuilt and get the sleeping bags on board, we can consider spending the weekend and participating in stone soup on a Saturday night.
Our first response was "How Cool is That?" Inviting the marina neighbors in for basic potluck dinner.
Dreams
The "Sailing Thing" is about dreaming. Much of the time, the colorful magazine articles are luscious photo spreads of exotic locations.
We find that our dreams aren't so much about the locations. We doubt we'll get much beyond the mouth of the Piankatank river. Our 2010 goals are places like Stingray Point (3 miles away) and Sandy Point (6 miles away) at the south end of Gwynn Island.
We're spending more time dreaming about meeting the neighbors.
We dream of ways to make this new pile of plastic comfortable and homey. Fabric, cushions, food, space, light, air, water. Bathrooms. Showers. Snacks. Cold Beer. Comfy place to read. Wi-Fi connections.
We spent a great deal of time talking about energy use. Lighting. Radios. Wiring (2/0 gauge). Battery fuse terminal blocks. The engine-room ampacity limit of 280A and the question of how close are we to using all 280 amperes. How many electrical things do we actually have? What do they require? How much charging do we need to do? How big a solar panel do we want? Where would be put it?
The biggy: Can we keep the computers charged? Can we get Wi-Fi from the docks or do we need a supplemental Wi-Fi antenna?
And whether or not we should start bringing some Stone Soup veggies each weekend in addition to our picnic lunch.

