Hi everyone.  We are getting very close to launch and it now appears that this coming week will be busy.  Today Spirit remains at Waterline.  She is having some final touchup to her keel but not the full blown race bottom job that we were expecting.  This is a disappointment, but we’ll work around it — I’ll provide details on what happened later.  We have more than enough residual paint to handle another season in the water and five months of winter sitting in the Waterline climate controlled facility at Quonset is an unplanned benefit to getting the boat completely dried out.  Moreover, the hull was waxed and looks great.

Spirit will be heading back to Wickford Safe Harbor Tuesday 8AM (Nick and I will tow her with Nick’s truck), and my expectation is that I’ll be given a couple of days to rig the spar, burnish the bottom and paint the saildrive.  If you have any bandwidth Tuesday or Wednesday (even just after work), that would be a huge help, but fully and completely optional.  

At this point it seems we could splash Thursday or Friday.  The forecast has pretty strong winds for the end of the week which might derail that — I’ll keep you posted.  This of course enables a transit back to the NAVSTA over the weekend.  Again, let you know.

If the end-of-week windy weather prevents launch or stepping the mast then everything might shift to the week after next.  This wouldn’t break my heart as we could probably do enough at Wickford to actually sail Spirit home.  

So some uncertainty but progress!