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December 19 - In the AM, Mark pulled together the last of his stuff, and prepared to head home.  We sat waiting up at the marina for his ride (who was 15 minutes late) and bid him farewell with many thanks for all of his help on this trip.  It was really great to have Mark with us for the first part of it, I am sure we would not have made as much progress.  For me the nicest thing of all though is that I feel like I got to know Mark a whole lot better than I did before, which was terrific.  He also had a lot of great insight for us from his experiences living on the boat - which helped make the settling in process easier, since he’d figured out the right places to store stuff, and a few great tricks to make living aboard a little easier.
After we saw Mark off, we walked up to the shop to pick up the shaft nuts that Axson had ordered for us, and then headed in to town briefly to pick up a couple of additional items we needed at the hardware store.  On our way back to the boat, Bri ducked into the marina’s showers to suit up in his wetsuit before hopping in the water to test out/install the new propeller.  I sat up on the stern and Bri went into the water to take his first look at the prop, or lack thereof.  Fortunately, the shaft was unbent (based on my turning it while Bri observed underwater) and the new prop was a great fit.  Brian was able to install the new propeller, shaft nuts and cotter pin all in a matter of about 30 minutes, and after he’d taken a shower to clean up and warm up, we radioed up to the shop to let them know that we were going to take a little spin around the harbor to test out the new propeller.  We cast off from the dock and headed out into the harbor, and to our great surprise and pleasure, not only did the new prop work well… but it actually gave us a dramatic increase in our speed - up from 4+kts to 6+kts at the same RPMs.  We whizzed around the harbor for about 20 minutes or so, and headed back to the dock.  Knowing that our next destination was Beaufort (approximately 60 SM away) and it was already 3PM by this point, we knew we wouldn’t be able to make enough headway before dark, so we opted to stay for the night and set out early in the AM.  As we were making that decision, a 100′ power yacht “Making Memories” pulled up to the marina dock behind us.  WOW huge boat!  The folks aboard were delivering the boat from Newport, RI and had just gotten back underway after a month in Cape May dealing with a blown engine.  We decided we’d stay in for the night and cook aboard, and they set off for dinner in town in the trusty little golf cart.  Our plan was to get up early and get underway so that we could make the full run to Beaufort, and we figured that the folks on the big motor yacht firing up their engines at 5 would wake us up…