Halloween approaches, weather remains hot

I was walking back to the boat, and was greeted on the sidewalk by the monster in the header image. Naturally I assumed that Jazz was getting spooky in preparation for Halloween — after all, it is already halfway through October, and some of the other sailors here have already decorated the clubhouse. But it turns out Jazz was just trying out a sunshade that’s been sitting on our boat for the last month, to see if it does anything to keep us cool.

The verdict: It’s actually pretty effective: it’s a mesh plastic material, so breeze passes through, but it absorbs a lot of the heat. Jazz: “Only my hands feel warm”, where she was holding the sheet up in the air.

The problem is, it’s really big — something like 43′ by 26′ (we measured and of course I didn’t write the numbers down):

(I busted out my drone to get an aerial shot (because drone), and that gives a better idea of the shape — and also tells me that if I’m going to be shooting down, I need to take the protective cover off the drone lens.)

So putting it up and taking it down is a pretty big project… which means we won’t do it if we’re just going to be somewhere for a couple of days. In hindsight, it would have been great to have put up right when we first moved in, before the boat sat on the dock for a couple of months. But now it’s not really worth the space. Here’s Jazz, checking whether it compresses into a full sized suitcase. It does not:

So it seems it’s coming back to San Francisco on our last trip, to sit in our storage unit and wait for our next trip to Burning Man. We’ll probably end up sewing all those purpose-built cuts together to make a shade structure for Walter, our ’76 RV.

Later that night we saw an absolutely amazing moonrise. Could we capture it on camera?

…apparently not.