What To Do Next? (Florida Boating, Post 27)

Tuesday, Feb 16

Here’s a couple of pictures of a ray that John took from the docks at our vacation rental.

The question of what to do next is now looming. It’s going to be too windy to take the boat out again, so we have 5 extra days. The entire country is in the midst of a major storm. Monica is getting lows like 12 degrees and 18 degrees in Houston! She had snow and ice and the power went out. 

Her power has been out since Monday morning and last night she said it was 51 degrees in her house! I feel so bad for her! John’s sister lives only a block away, so at least she’s not down there by herself. But still, the entire region has no power.

When I was a kid we had power outages in the ice quite commonly, so we were equipped. We had a nice safe wood stove for warmth. Unfortunately we would lose our water because the well pump doesn’t run without electricity. When John and I were remodeling the house in Placitas, a solar panel to run the well pump was high on my priority list. I guess I do have a self-sufficiency streak. But we sold that house and sadly, have no solar panels anymore (except the two on the van and the one on the boat). Someday I would like to put solar panels on the house in Tucson.

Meanwhile, we’re feeling very lucky to be in southern Florida. We were originally planning for two final nights at the resort after the second sailing trip, so we’ve applied those two nights to this stay instead. That means we get to stay here all the way until Friday morning in our very nice waterfront room. But soon we’re going to have to face the drive back across the country – in headwinds with crazy cold weather.

It’s 78° here this morning. As I chart our route back across the country I’m astounded at the low temperatures all across the southernmost part of the country. It’s 23° in Mobile, Alabama, 26° in New Orleans, 15° in Houston, 15° in San Antonio, 25° in Las Cruces New Mexico.

Noooo – I don’t want to go! 

It’s crazy shit. Houston is usually almost as warm as southern Florida!

We had been thinking of using our extra days to break up the trip – stay a few days somewhere like New Orleans (John votes for Mobile, and I’m like, Mobile? Mobile Alabama? Why?) I’ve never been to the southeast before now (except to fly to Florida), and I wouldn’t have thought of Mobile as the one best place in all of the southeast to visit. If you could only visit one town in the southeast, you would choose…maybe Charleston or Atlanta or certainly New Orleans, yes, but Mobile? I don’t think so!

Turns out’s a moot issue anyway, because of this freak storm hitting the southeast. We’re going to wait in southern Florida as long as we can, and then head back across the country as quickly as reasonable. We’ll have to visit New Orleans (and possibly also Mobile, lol) some other time.

We do want to stop and visit Monica – I was unhappy with our brief 15 minute visit on the way out. We’re going to rent an airbnb so we can visit with her outdoors without staying in her house, to make sure we don’t inadvertently expose her to covid. She hasn’t been able to get the vaccine yet.

The next morning the rain is heading our way and it’s time to get the boat out of the water.

It’s a beautiful morning.

John’s got the trailer in the water.

He’s just going to walk the boat over to the trailer rather than use the outboard motor. Boat-on-a-leash style. “Come on boy, that’s right, here we go, come on, that’s it, good boy…”

We’re going to store the boat on its trailer, on a storage lot right there in the Keys. We hope that soon, after we’re vaccinated, we can fly back and go sailing again. It’s risky leaving it on the Keys, because it could get destroyed in a hurricane. It’s just going to be sitting out in the open on its trailer in a parking lot. But we don’t use it in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, so we want to give this a try. We would hop on a plane and have a boat waiting for us!

The storage company even offers a boat launching service for a modest fee, so we won’t have to try to rent a vehicle capable of launching a boat. Sailing in the Florida Keys without having to tow a boat across the country – I can get behind that idea!

The calm before the storm.

Just an hour after we got the boat out of the water, the weather turned bad. Although nothing like the rest of the country, even we were affected by the storms – rain and wind for the rest of the day.

The next day we went to Bahai Honda State Park. We weren’t very impressed and didn’t stay long. The small beach was unremarkable. It was crowded and almost no one was wearing a mask. What, there’s no pandemic on the Keys? I doubt that.

This picture took effort – to get birds with no people. What you can’t see is the big crowd of people just to the right.

The nature center was closed. I thought the building was cool though.

An abandoned train trestle.

I’ve always had unsettling dreams about rusting steel and crumbling cement structures over water. I assume it is from some childhood memory of California. I’m quite sure I was never in Florida as a child.

Look at that rust.

There was a boat launch and some boats tied up in the small cove. We may launch from here sometime in the future, just because it’s a good location relative to where we’d like to sail.

This big sailboat looks a lot like one we saw at anchor a couple of days before.

It’s twice the size of ours. We’d have plenty of room on that boat! You can’t exactly tow it around on a trailer though.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com