Whitehall, birthplace of US Navy

 Actually, there are several claimants to that title, but Whitehalls is fairly solid. Benedict Arnold built a fleet of ships here in 1776 and they were used later that year in a major battle on Lake Champlain. Anyway, we, (Johannah Schneider and I) are tied up on that site, which is now the Whitehall Marina. We had a nice run down what is a really beautiful part of the lake when Johannah arrived a bit after 2. Normally I would go thru the first lock and tie up on the bulkhead for free, but the authorities have reduced the hours of operation, so I caved in and rented a slip for the night. An extremely bad habit to get into, but there don"t appear to be any anchoring options.

Meanwhile, the other story continues:

The batteries weren't completely dead, they just didn't have the oomph to turn over the big Perkins diesel. But Fred could read the writing on the wall and asked if we had a manual pump aboard that didn't require electricity. I got out of a storage locker a large Edson pump that fit the bill. And so the pumping began. It was quite tiring, but we had motivation, knowing that we were 50 miles offshore on what no one could deny was a sinking boat. We took turns, and with 4 able bodied men aboard we were able to keep up with it. I don't recall my mother taking a turn, and my dear little sister was clueless. We discussed which inlets on the Florida coast would be easiest to negotiate under sail and figured it would be based on the weather at the time. Then I remembered the Honda.

To be continued