Wow! It’s different up north

Well, it’s happened, we are now back in CT and home for the next two weeks.   As we have for the last 6 winters, we had made sure that the house was thoroughly winterized with antifreeze in the boiler, had been inspected by a professional who has undergone hvac training for heating repair as well as heat pump repair, all domestic water pipes blown out and antifreeze in the toilets, dishwasher… before we shut the front door to head south.

So, now it’s late February, the house is warm (sort of), the water turned on and all that work, getting the house closed up is, well, down the drain, literally.   

We arrived late yesterday afternoon to a wintry landscape of snow and ice.   This is the view out of our front door a few moments ago.   Note the nod to nautical, the anchor on the porch.  Contrast that to the sunset behind Pandora, our last night aboard.   “Behind” is the operative word.  Sunsets in the Caribbean are always behind the boat as the wind is always from the east.   How inconvenient it would be to have to crane our necks if it wasn’t always behind us.   Love those trade winds. So much for tropics for the next two weeks.

So back to arriving home.   I had set the furnace to a cool 40 degrees for the winter when we left and somewhere along the line the furnace failed and when I went to turn up the heat, NOTHING HAPPENED.   Yikes, it was 43 in the house and no way to make it warmer.

After a quick call to the oil company and our plumber, I realized that I could try the reset button on the furnace and voila, it turned on.  However, I still want to have someone out to look things over as I have no idea what caused it to fail and somewhere along the way it had gotten VERY COLD inside.   So cold that water inside the fridge froze.   That’s cold.

Well, it’s now warm in the house, although that is a relative description as I now have on an undershirt, long sleeve shirt, fleece, long pants, socks.  Well, you get the picture and that’s in contrast to my normal tropical attire of shorts.  Just shorts,  that’s it with the addition of a shirt to keep the sun off as needed.   Oh yeah, while the water here is frozen, the water in Martinique is “dip worthy”.  Hmm…

And, speaking of Martinique, Pandora is now on a mooring in Le Marin, which has the least expensive moorings I have ever encountered.   Believe it or not, Pandora’s monthly rate for the mooring is about $135 a month.   A MONTH!  Can you believe it?  Not to torture the price thing too much but a mooring in Sag Harbor, The Hamptons in NY,  for Pandora at 47′ is $94/night.  That’s for ONE NIGHT!   In Martha’s Vineyard it’s in the $50/night range and Nantucket around $85/night.

And, to tie up Med Moor on the dock is cheap too, something like $35/night.   The place is so reasonably priced that the entire year is booked, with short windows sometimes available for transient visits, by December of the PRIOR YEAR, including summer in-water storage.   Amazing.

t’s no surprise that the place, with 600 slips, some say as many as 1,000 and hundreds of moorings, is always full as it’s so reasonably priced.   Pandora is actually in this shot but she’s so far out in the harbor that she doesn’t even show up.   I’d estimate that in the general area there are perhaps as many as 2,000 boats in slips, on moorings and at anchor at any given time.   And, as you can imagine, just about any sort of marine related service is readily at hand and at reasonable prices.
So here we are in CT for two weeks, punctuated with visits to MD and our family, before heading back to Pandora to resume our visit to the Windward Islands, south to Grenada.

After that?  Not sure but I am leaning toward bringing Pandora north this spring in spite of the fact that it’s such a long trip back north,  a real slog.

For now, I’ll just focus on staying warm and look forward to the fun of re-winterizing the house once again before we head back to Martinique.

After a few months in tropical weather, all I can say is “wow, it’s different up here”.

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