This just in... Frances' Special Bird Blog

 We've revised this edition of our blog to include a new feature, "Bird News From Frances." First, a question: Can you identify this bird?

Frances knows a lot about birds and can often identify them just from their call. The bird shown above stumped her. It was photographed by a dock mate who saw perched it on the bow rail of his boat. If you know what kind of bird this is, please let us know.

Mallard Mans Up To Help Mate

In most northern-nesting ducks, males play little to no role in brood care. In fact, most male ducks abandon the female when she begins incubation or shortly after her eggs hatch. The bright plumage of the drakes may attract predators, so the male ducks rarely attend broods. Most female ducks usually remain with their broods until they are nearly on the wing. However, female ruddy ducks, diving ducks and sea ducks may remain with their broods for only a few days or weeks. Ducklings in these groups are well insulated and adapted to deep-water habitats; thus, they can avoid predators by swimming to open-water areas or by diving, and need little parental care.  In other words, male ducks duck…This daddy duck did not.  (Photo taken this weekend at our marina.)

 Meanwhile back to on our boat....

We spent this beautiful weekend doing stuff around the boat. Frances and Pooka, The Boat Cat have finished moving in for the summer and the inside of the boat looks great with everything finally put away.

But, as with any boat, there are always things to do. Our inflatable needed air and we pumped that up.  There were a few items that we needed to buy and, since we are going to take the boat out next weekend, we needed to make a list. If you've been boating for any length of time, you know how important the "list" can be.

We also spent some time on Saturday removing and bypassing a connector that connects the starboard engine to the the upper and lower helms. The rubber coated connector wasn't in good shape and it took us the better part of two hours to carefully remove it. Okay, it's been in there since 1980 but we feel better knowing that it is no longer something that we depend on.

Next weekend, our current plan is to leave on Saturday for Napatree, better known as Watch Hill, RI. We've been there many times before (as has everyone else is these parts) and by the time we get there, it will be crowded with boats. The chart below shows where we are going. The numbers are waypoints that we've set over the years. Lets hope for good weather.

On Sunday afternoon, our dockmates Ron and Lou Ann returned from Greenport, where we were last week. Interestingly, they said that when they arrived in Greenport on Friday night, they were the only boat in this beautiful marina. We had the same experience a week ago when we arrived on a Thursday afternoon. Perhaps the cost of fuel ($4.60 at our marina) had something to do with this.

We shot some video of them docking. Where we dock, this is never easy but they did a great job. We hope our next cruise ends as effortlessly as theirs.