July 1 -- Rainy Lay Day in Portland

We registered, paid our bill and found out that the only place to which we could take a long walk to fill our propane bottle, only delivers home size bottles and does not refill odd sizes like boat bottles. We are not out of cooking gas, and even if we were, we have a spare auxiliary supply, but Lene likes to think ahead.  She loves being "fully stocked"

My mission today was to visit Hamilton Marine, the Westmarine of Maine. Its warehouse is a few hundred yards from the shipyard at which we are moored. I had gotten things here on prior visits and I just like the feel of the place, the extensive stock they have on hand and the friendly and competent help they provide. I spent a few hundred bucks, mostly on LED bulbs for interior lighting. A non sailor might ask: Why pay $19.00 for a lightbulb? Well, for one thing, they never burn out -- good for 50,000 hours is close enough to never for me. But the real reason is that they use almost no electricity. We have had them for navigation and our anchor light for a while, and these are for the frequently used interior lights. I also got a spare can of air for the fog horn, a barrel bolt so the cafe doors can't swing open with a bang during tacks (I must be an idiot to have waited six years for this!!) and other screws and bolts that were needed to complete projects that had been on hold until such hardware could be obtained.  None of these projects were mission critical, but they are all nice to have done: Lene is happy. One bit that they didn't have was a thin brass interior piano hinge to replace one that broke on a cabinet door in the aft head. They had plenty of hefty marine grade hinges, but not the tiny one I needed. Up walked Dave

who said he might have one at home that he could give to me. We exchanged phone numbers and  I gave him half the broken hinge. (Sort of like the half locket that Annie's parents had left her with at the orphanage.) Dave called; he didn't have my particular hinge at home but he had driven to Ace Hardware, on the other side of town,  and bought it for me. And meeting him at his fishing boat at our marina, I had to struggle to persuade him to take any money! Dave is a 6th grade teacher and I told him his students were lucky to have him. We have each others' phone numbers and maybe we can get together for the big Fourth of July Fireworks concert. What a fine representative of the State of Maine!
We had planned to do some touring after lunch but rain dampened those plans so I finished off all those projects. Don't worry, there are more of them. 
Lene cooked up a great dinner and reading by LED bulb is easy on the batteries.