Location: Annapolis, MD
We started off our morning with a breakfast of bagels as we got ready to do a major boat clean-up, or “boat appreciation.” We started by splitting into a couple of different groups. Some people washed the deck. Another group cleaned the galley. There was a third group that also was in charge of cleaning all the surfaces in the cabins, and a fourth group was in charge of “rust-busting.” Rust busting is where we use a special solution to scrub off the rust that has built up on the side of the boat as a result of exposed metal. It took us a couple of hours to complete all of those tasks. While we were cleaning in the morning, though, there was a regatta happening in the bay. There had to have been at least 100 sailboats doing their own thing sailing around in the race. There was this one really cool sailboat that had a hydrofoil and looked like it was just hovering above the water! The regatta was still going on when we started lunch. Lunch was a delicious tortilla soup. Soon after lunch cleanup, we started cleaning again, and a couple of us who were done helped take out the storm anchor. It was a whole process. There were two extremely heavy pieces and one heavy, but light enough to just pick up ourselves. Getting the two heavy pieces out was a whole process, though. We used the two jib halyards to hoist the two anchor pieces out of the bilge. The bilge was in the girl’s cabin, and the anchor pieces were covered in a lot of bags of assorted items. After we moved those items, we could start hoisting the pieces. Tim and I were in the bilge itself, and I was able to help him get the second piece out. The first piece, though, he could handle maneuvering it himself. As either Tim or I held the piece in position, other helping hands on the halyards slowly took up the line to haul the anchor up onto the deck. Actually, assembling the anchor itself may be a job for tomorrow. once we finished getting the anchor up, we all sat down to a very filling and good dinner of spatzel. Finally, we ended off the day with cleanup and the squeeze before falling into anchor watch rotationsanother great day for us on Argo.