Hugging the head is something that people do when they over overindulge. And since it was my birthday you might have thought that I was celebrating. Many of you don’t know that the joys of boating are always either preceded or bookmarked by the joy of working on the boat head. It seems that anytime we had guests on Paracas, our first boat, we always had to work on the head when guests came aboard.

I’m not sure of the head history on Dragonfly, but Al decided to be proactive and change out the macerator pumps prior to our departure. Since he and Joe were busy drilling holes in the boat, I took on the the task of replacing two of the three head macerator pumps. Fortunately with the boat laid up for over six months all the lines were dry.

There’s always a list of things to do prior to putting the boat back in the water. Al and Jill had one half-page left over from the last cruise and another whole page generated over the summer. With four of us working on the list quite a number of things get crossed off hourly. And every time the UPS or FedEx truck arrives those new replacement parts quickly get installed. One thing that amazed me was that Al would order two replacement parts and one extra for a spare, that’s literally unheard of on Dragonfly.

The day wasn’t all work and no play. We went out for the evening birthday celebration at a local fish restaurant called Paul’s, and had delicious grouper, shrimp, Mahi and crabcakes. Stanna planned an ice cream and cake celebration when we got home from the restaurant, but as you can see from the photo we didn’t have matches to light the six and six, so we just had to enjoy the fact that she purchased them with our Carrot cake.

A good time was had by all.