We spent the morning cleaning the boat (John) and doing yoga on the deck (Timi), then decided it was time to head out to ‘sea’ for a lovely cruise to Erie, PA. John started the engines and began the departure ‘check’. And much to our surprise, while the Raymarine navigation system would boot up but then the master display kept inexplicably restarting itself every sixty seconds. So, it was lucky that we had planned to leave early-ish, as John had to spend the next two hours taking with Raymarine tech support. The software was never updated on one of the displays due to bad card reader and wasn’t as toleratant of errors in weather feed causing it to restart every 30 seconds. BEcause the GPS was connected to this display it caused the chart plotter on the other display to stop functioning.
Two hours later after swapping positions of the displays and with a card reader on order we made our way to the Erie, PA harbor. Upon arrival at the mouth of the harbor, we came upon two clipper ships. They were old fashioned, pirate-y, long, sleek, and majestic with their hoisted sails. As we came up to them, they actually began shooting canons at each other! We assumed it was some sort of entertaining reenactment in the harbor rather than a real skirmish so all we had to do was figure out how to get past them into the harbor without disrupting their display. Captain John slowed the boat down and we made our way peacefully by on the starboard side. After docking, we took a cab into Erie to get groceries and supplies. Then went to a nice dinner at The Pufferbelly, a firestation reinvented into a restaurant with floor to (tall) ceiling glass windows where the roll up doors used to be, brick walls, and old fashioned firefighting paraphernalia as décor. Built in 1908, it operated as a firehouse until 1979 and opened as the Pufferbelly Restaurant in 1984. The restaurant borrowed its name from the nickname given to steam pumpers and fire engines in the late 1800s.
We returned to the boat and began to settle in for the night. Suddenly, the bow began moving in and away from the dock, back and forth. We could see that the harbor flags were completely flat and rectangular against the sky – the wind was blowing hard. We added an extra bow line and tightened everything up and hoped for the best. There was a lot of thunder and lightning and big rain and wind, but luckily, we were we weren’t underway when it hit, and all was fine in the harbor.
Write a comment