Sadly this week started like the last several and that meant I was covered in dust from sanding, chipping, pulling screws, pulling teak, and filling screw holes with epoxy.

I did this for a bit and finished sanding the side of the deck that I have pulled the teak up from.  There is a lot more work to do, but this felt like a good place to teak a break since I had planned on taking the weekend and Thursday and Friday off of work.

Each year in Madisonville LA, they have a Wooden Boat Festival.  When we bought our boat there was a plaque on mounted in the galley that said it had won some award in 2008 at the show.  I found this interesting, first because the boat isn’t actually a wooden hull but I guess it had enough of it and has that classic boat look that it was in the show and placed well.

As most of you that read this blog know, there is no way she is in any shape to have anywhere near a boat show at this time, but we still wanted to go and be part of the festivities.  A bunch of us at the Marina all talked about heading down river and finding a good place to anchor out on Wednesday or Thursday before the boat show weekend and we would just stay out there.

We found a great spot in the bend of the river and there were 3 boats that we were rafted up with.  Ours, Keith and Debbie and David and Leigh.
Keith and Debbie have a Grand Banks trawler named “Grand Lady” and David and Leigh have a bluewater causing houseboat named “Sanctuary of Sanity”  Keith was the first to drop the hook and tie off to a tree with his stern so that we wouldn’t swing with the wind.  We came up next and dropped the hook and backed down onto their port side and also tied our stern to a tree.  With this we were pretty locked into our position and ready for David and Leigh to come tie up on the starboard side of Grand Lady the next day.

About 20 yards down river there was another large raft up of boats from our Marina so all in all there was a good crowd down there.   We had a blast at the show and spent more time with kids activities then we did looking inside the boats.  From the outside these things were all gorgeous rebuilds of boats from the 30’s and 40s.  If anyone is in Madisonville in early October, this is a cool event.   Not only do they have the boats, but they have some great food, vendors, kids activities including a boat building station, they had kids games (carnival like games) and they have a “down and dirty boat building contest” where they build wooden boats and then sail them on the 2nd day of the event.

We rode in the dinghy as the boats were setting up Thursday and Friday nights for the show.  We also went and visited some friends over at the local restaurant right along the river front.

As we were heading back to the boat, Chasity started saying “I want to say hi to Claire, I want to say hi to Claire”  I said, OK, we will see her tomorrow when she comes out to the boat and joins us, then Chasity let me know she saw her standing on the dock over at Friends (The place in front of us in the photo).  How she saw her from that distance I don’t know but it was cool to go over there and then a few other dinghy’s of our friends all pulled up and we enjoyed a nice chat over there for a while before taking the girls back to the boat.