Yesterday, we had a delightful social day.  We meet with Nate Hathaway for lunch, a former associate of mine from when I was teaching sailing on the west coast.  He is now working on a W-class raceboat (http://www.w-class.com) that is having work done here before she heads down to the Caribbean for the winter. Another chance for us to wander around Newport Shipyard and see the most amazing superyachts on the planet.

While we were waiting for Nate, we watched while a crane pulled the mast out of Topaz, the newest of the huge and beautiful J-Class boats. http://www.hoekdesign.com/yacht/j8-topaz

This is a picture of me standing nest to the mast step of an aluminum stick that is every bit of 200 feet tall. No, you can’t see the other end of it in this picture, it goes on forever!

Karen also go a picture of Nate and I in the cockpit of Wild Horses, the truly beautiful traditional racing boat that Nate works on these days.  That laminated wood steering wheel is just a work of art unto itself.

In the later afternoon we took our dinghy over to Harbor House and met Miles and Carol for drinks.  They also own an Amel Super Maramu just like Harmonie, but a little newer.  Delightful people, and drinks with the most awesome view of Narragansett Bay possible.

We stopped in downtown Newport for dinner where we shared a huge bucket of steamer clams and a lobster pizza.  It was really tasty and quite an attractive meal.

Just one problem…  sometime in the middle of the night Karen got out of bed and spent the next few hours with all the ugliest symptoms of food poisoning.  Which is totally strange, because I was fine, and all day we had eaten exactly the same things!  I think it was that third clam from the left.  He looked a  little dicey…. Fortunately, by the morning she was better.

While she recovered from her sleep deprived night, I walked to  he hardware store and got a tool I needed to fix the watermaker.  Since that repair was successful, today counts as a slow, but productive day.