04 June 2011 Seguin is Fueled By Zeke’s!

There are good ways to start your day and bad ways to start your day.  A bad way to start your day may, just may, involve waking up at 0530 to shuffle all of your gear into your truck, firing off a last couple of emails, and heading down to Popham for your ride out to the island, only to find the keys to said island are back at the house.  When it rains it pours, so it wasn’t just Ethan I delayed with my disorganization, but he had scheduled a charter to bring a couple out to Seguin, so I fouled everyone’s morning up.  My new rule is the Seguin keys will live in my truck while we are off island.

In the end it all worked out.  Mother drove the keys down to us despite her injured foot, and we were underway by 0730.  On a lighter note Darcy got to make another vertical descent into the waiting boat, as Ethan had Leeward instead of his little boat, and with the tide low, it was quite the drop to the deck.  The dog remains unimpressed with the embarkation process.

Happily the day only got better as it went on.  Once on the island Ethan, his crew, and the guests, all helped Amy & I get our gear to the tram, and then into the house, which we are very grateful for.  Ethan’s charter guests, Zach & Andrea, hailed from Baltimore, and had brought us a bag of coffee beans from Zeke’s Coffee.  Seguin is now Fueled By Zeke’s.  Zach, as it turns out, is a volunteer on the S.S. John Brown, which is one of two Liberty Ships left from World War II, and is kept up by a volunteer preservation society.  He also teaches at a mariner training school, works part time for Moran on their harbor tugs, and knows a couple of my classmates from MMA.  Needless to say we had a fantastic visit.

They all hung around for a few hours, and upon their departure it was time to stow all the supplies & clean laundry.  I then tackled galley a few cleaning projects to fill the time while I had various edibles simmering on the stove; I have discovered it is far easier to do the majority of the cooking on two or three days a week than spread it out over several days.

The afternoon got quiet for a while until our second set of visitors arrived bearing a gift of four lobsters for Amy & I!  First lobster of the season!  They said they thought it would be a nice present regardless of who was out here, but as it turns out Brian Spivey is an acquaintance of my father, and Lynn Spivey was Amy’s 2^nd grade teacher as well as a close family friend.  What a small world it is.  We had an excellent time talking with them & giving them the tour, and are looking forward to seeing them again later in the summer. 

As a direct result of Brian & Lynn’s visit, instead of the dinner of soup we had planned, we had lobster & sweet potato fries.  It’s a rough life.  Like true Maniacs, it took Amy & I less than thirty minutes two devour two lobsters and pick the other two for lobster salad tomorrow.  Darcy, who had never encounter the armored ocean bugs before, was mightily confused while they were alive (we had a close call with his nose, the pooch chased down an escapee after I had removed the bands from their claws), and wicked intrigued by the smells once they were cooked. 

Of course the speed with which we attacked dinner may have had more to do with the temperature, which was rapidly plummeting through the 50’s and heading for the 40’s, than our hunger.  We went to bed after cleanup of the feast with perfect visibility- who can argue with the sun setting behind Mt Washington- a light SSE’ly breeze, and partly cloudy skies.