The headsail furling system has been fully reassembled, and is working smoothly and quietly. All is happy! Hopefully we have all the things back right after the idiot in Florida made such a hash of it. Kudos to Steve Maddon and his guys at M Yachts for some excellent work on getting new parts made, first class customer service, and keeping things on schedule.

If you have a Super Maramu, you might be interested in this page on how to disassemble the furler gearbox, along with some other thoughts and ideas on that system. 

Today we put the jib back up, and then from here on out it’s just details. Karen was out and about shopping yesterday, and saved us some potential hassle at our next major destination–Nova Scotia.

When you arrive in the territorial waters of a new country, you raise a solid yellow flag on the starboard side of the mast to indicate that you have not cleared customs and are officially in “Quarantine.” (In the flag signals the solid yellow is the letter “Q”). Once you clear customs, you fly a “courtesy flag”, that is the flag of the country you are visiting in the same place to indicate that you have completed the check-in formalities.

What Karen remembered is that we did NOT have a Canadian flag to fly after we cleared Canadian customs! From the reports we hear, the Canadian officials are endlessly polite, because…Canada! but are also rather insistent that the rules be followed.

We never heard of anybody having a problem because they were not following proper flag etiquette, but for the price of one small flag, why test it? A visit to the local chandlery and we are now prepared–or at least more prepared than we were!

For now, getting the details ready to go is the job. Those always take longer than we expect, but with hot and muggy summer weather settling in over Chesapeake Bay, we are looking longingly at the weather reports from Halifax where the daily high temperatures for the comming week struggle to break 60…