Dog River Marina (fifth day) - 11/23/10

Another day of waiting for repairs to the boat. The owner of the marina and repair yard, Sonny Middleton stopped by early this morning to give me an update on the progress. We expect the replacement shaft to come back from the machine shop on Wednesday and the coupler to get here Friday. The only problem is that the repair facility will be closed from Thanksgiving day thru Sunday, so it looks like Monday will be the earliest to install the stuff. As I have indicated before, the folks have been great and are always appologizing for the time it is taking which is really outside their control. Shortly after Sonny left the boat, Debbie & Rob who we met at Columbus Marina, stopped by on their way to the West Marine Store which is less than a 100 yards up the road where we are parked. As they were leaving, John and Carol Segal (Seas 2 Day) that we sat with almost every day at the rendezvous, stopped on their way to West Marine. They went to Cancun after Joe Wheeler and we had not seen them since. Since we had a rental car and it did not seem fiscally responsible to let it sit and do boat chores, we talked to Skip and Barb (Moor $tuff) who left Monday for Eastern Shore Marina across the bay, and made plans to meet for lunch and do Fairhope. Eastern Shore is a marina we had planned to visit for a couple days so by going over today we can skip going there and cover a few days we are sitting still. The marina is very nice and surrounded by beautiful homes. The harbor host over there has invited those loopers in the area to their home for Thanksgiving dinner and the four of us made plans to attend. We went into downtown Fairhope which is a lovely town and had lunch in the "French Quarter" which is very much like it should be part of New Orleans and ate in an open garden area. Of course shopping was next on the agenda so Skip and I accompanied them just long enough to find a pub where we landed until they were done and rescued us. After coming back to the marina, we stopped by a docktail party on Debbie & Rob's boat where we met one couple from France who shipped their boat here to do the loop and Cuba and are planning on going around South America next. The other couple was from Quebec. We enjoyed meeting them very much. Norm and Sue (Run Around Sue) were docked right behind Rob's boat and we stopped there and had a docktail with them and John and Carol (Seas 2 Day) before returning to our boat to watch the finals of Dancing with the Stars.