Whereabouts
One of us more comfortable with heights…
... than is the other.
Where the heck are they now? We’ve settled into Riverview Marina at the junction of Catskill Creek and the Hudson River to work on our mast and rigging for a few days. Until now, we needed to have our mast down due to the low bridges throughout the New York Canals, but we can now convert from a motorboat and be set up for sailing from this point on. We’re preparing a slideshow of our transit of the Canals – quite a unique experience! We expect to be posting that in the next week. In the meantime, we’d like to introduce a new page on our blog call “Whereabouts”. It’s an abbreviated ship’s log for Shirley’s Mom and all others who may be keen to keep track of our route. You can get to it from the top menu bar of our Ariose Notes homepage.
We’ll close by sharing last evening’s sunset, as the tide swept out the last of the autumn leaves. Lovely.
Our dream involved leisurely cruising, bathing suits as our usual attire, exploring palm-fringed bays looking for ideal anchorages. Instead, we find ourselves in an alternate universe of sorts, 
No, “on-the-hard” isn’t another reiteration of our grounding. We have almost gotten over that. It’s a nautical term to refer to boats out-of-water, and although Ariose WAS on the hard limestone for those few hours of pounding, she was still technically in the water, therefore not on-the-hard. Oops, I promised not to go there again – we covered that incident in more than enough detail in the Launching & Grounding posts. This Ariose Note holds no drama, no suspense, no cliff-hangers. 
We ended our last Ariose Note at the point of gently grounding on the first day out on our grand adventure. It was too shallow to get into the dock at Main Duck Island, en route across Lake Ontario to the New York Canals that were to take us south. We needed another option.