Adrenaline alley

What a week !
First, scrambling to try and find a crew, at least for the first part of the trip. A lot of brothers and friends mobilized themselves, and thanks especially to brother Leve Taud, from the Normandie table, I now have company in the person of Jean-Francois Leroy, who will join me in Fort Lauderdale in June and stay with me at least up to Tahiti and possibly to New Caledonia. Great relief for me.
Then for the remainder of the week, I was chasing time, with the freezer, the genset and the electronics lagging behind. I still had to have the cables on the steering system changed, but that did not worry me too much as it was in the hands of Cary.
On Friday morning, I ran the genset, just to make sure, and disaster struck again. The beast was again spraying itself with water. I shut down in a hurry and called Don to come have a look. To cut the story short, it turned out that the exhaust elbow where the cooling water comes in had become totally blocked and the back pressure had made the cap of the expansion bottle (which is located way below the engine ???) pop out and it was spraying the coolant in the engine room.
Luckily, Don found a new stainless steel elbow in town and put it in place, and also relocated the expansion bottle to be level with the top of the engine. When we ran the unit, the outflow of the cooling water was at least fifty times as much as it used to be. I hope this is the end of the problems for that piece of equipment.
On the steering cables, after talking to Edson, it turned out that what was important was to change the conduits, along with the cables. So we ordered those together with new fittings and now the steering, at last, feels like I was expecting all along. I can now turn the wheel with my little finger with no efforts. The windvane and the autopilot will certainly appreciate.
On Wednesday, the brothers of the Chesapeake Bay table came to the boat to drink to my going away. Nice sent off from a group that I love dearly.
Saturday morning, some of them were at it again, to help me cast the lines. Although the boat was still in a big mess with lots of sorting out and cleaning to do, I cast off the lines at 7:44 a.m. with Mike, my riding buddy, coming along for the ride to Coinjock.
It was very important for me to get under way at the time I had said I would.
Amids showers and strong southerly winds, we arrived in Coinjock at 4:00 p.m., where Rob and Holly on Hamshire Rose were waiting for me for a last reunion. Mike's son Michael was also there and we had a very pleasant evening together. For the first time since I have been coming to Coinjock, I finally had the prime rib for which it is so famous, and I certainly was not disappointed.
I decided to stay in Coinjock on Sunday as I need to clean and sort things out before making a run for Fort Lauderdale but I will play it safe and comfortable. No ETA to comply with . . .