Our Harry Potter-named boat was playing magic tricks on us tonight!  You could say we’ve had our first mishap of the voyage, but all’s well that ends well.

We had a busy day today.  Our friends Lana and Dave live in nearby Portsmouth, so we’ve spent a lot of time with them this week.  We had dinner at their house last night and the kids slept over in order to have more time with their sons, Liam and Calan.  Chris and I came back to the boat last night and worked until almost 0100 (military time here at sea.  makes log keeping much easier.  hope you can deal with it.).  Lana came to the yacht club this morning at 0915 to bring them back.  Lana has set a goal to complete a triathlon this summer, so she and I “trained” together by doing some open water swimming off the boat.  The wetsuits are stylin’.Then we took the boat in to the yacht club dock to “pump out” (you seriously don’t want to know what this means), fill our water tanks, and swab the decks (yes, seriously).  This procedure took us over 4 hours.  We spent some extra time cleaning the boat while we have full access to a dock with unlimited hose usage.  Amazing what is already grounds for getting us all excited.  A hose?  And we can use it for three hours?  Golly!  What a day!

In the middle of all that, Lana and I took the kids over to the Ida Lewis Yacht Club, where Lana’s sons are taking sailing camp.  The kids and I did a short presentation to the teen campers about our year-long sailing trip.  It was a great experience for the kids and the campers were really enthusiastic about hearing our story.  They had lots of great questions for us.  Bryson, Reese, and Porter were a little shy about talking to the group, but afterwards, they said they enjoyed it and would like to do something like that again.  I think we might try it again the next time we are in an area with a sailing club.

After the presentation and cleaning the boat, we got back to our mooring and had a visit from Kathleen (Chris’ sister) and Maureen (our step-cousin).  They are in town for a party and stopped by to check out the boat and say hello.  After that, we took the dinghy in to the yacht club and met Dave, who was just finishing up racing for the day (Dave is a professional sailor and a sail designer with Quantum Sails).  We drove back to Lana and Dave’s house to spend another evening together.  The kids had a great time playing, as always, and we relaxed in the cool breeze in their great backyard.Dave drove us back to the yacht club at around 2130 and we got into the dinghy to head back to our mooring.  We had bags of groceries from the store as well as all our shoes and our big Patronus bag of clothes and toiletries that we brought to shower at Lana/Dave’s house.  In addition, the dinghy was wet from the damp air, so I was holding the eggs and trying not to completely sit down on the wet boat in my dress.  We were going for awhile, when all of a sudden Chris said, “Where’s our boat?”

It was so dark that I could barely see anything.  I looked around and could make out the boat that was next to us in the mooring field as well as the one that was on the other side of us.  But there weren’t any boats in between them!  We motored around and couldn’t find Patronus anywhere.  I was convinced it was stolen.  Porter was crying.  Bryson was saying, “If someone wanted to steal a boat, they would have chosen a much nicer boat than ours.  Look around!  I would choose one of these really nice boats!”  So funny.  I think our boat is pretty amazing, but it IS Newport and there are some truly gorgeous yachts here.

At this point, I was starting to panic even while keeping in mind that you can’t get far in a boat that averages about 7 miles per hour and has the word “Patronus” on it in giant letters on both sides.  So we motored all the way back to the yacht club and I found the launch operator.  I yelled to him, “We can’t find our boat!”  He looked at me like I was crazy.  I’m guessing a lot of people go out at night, get drunk and can’t find their boats.  Then he said, “Oh, are you from Patronus? We moved you to a new mooring.  You’re on #423 now.”  It turns out that a bigger boat is coming in tonight and needs the mooring we were on because that mooring can handle a heavier load.  So they had to move us to a lighter one.

I didn’t realize that that was a normal thing that could happen.  In New Jersey, you could get in a fist fight for moving someone’s shopping cart three feet to get past it in the aisle.  It was a little bizarre to think that someone just got on our boat and moved it.  Chris says they probably towed it with the launch, but still.  The launch operator had to lead us to our boat because we never would have found it in the dark.  So here we are, safe and sound, with one little mini-adventure under our belts.  Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings (besides the Wickford Art Fair, a possible bicycle ride, a nice dinner in town, and an overnight on the boat with the Armitage’s!)