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.
We finally had a good night out on the water! It was calm – we had wind but no swell – the boat was not rocking & rolling – it hardly moved at all. And we never got close to bottom at low tide. Fourth night’s the charm! Finally we found a good anchorage. This has been a learning curve!
This anchorage is well protected from the south and southeast winds, and it’s deep enough to not ground in middle of the night with an unexpectedly low tide.
Here’s what I saw when I got up in the morning. That’s what it’s supposed to look like!
On Sunday morning we relaxed and played on the water – one of the few days so far on this vacation that felt like a vacation.
But now it was time to sail back to shore.
We had originally planned to sail 5 days, stay in the resort for 2, and sail for another 5 days. But we would not be able to go out on the second sailing trip, due to deteriorating weather, in particular, a forecast of high winds. We already had higher winds than ideal, and our little boat just wouldn’t do well in worse winds. Our sailing for this trip is soon to be over. We would have to pull the boat out of the water, put it in storage, and hope to be back some other time.
We were reluctant to leave, even though we had already paid for our reservations at the resort for that night and it was way too late for a refund. We seriously considered staying on the boat instead! It was like – we finally got this thing figured out, and now we don’t want to leave!
We sailed back to shore sadly, knowing that we would be taking the boat out of the water instead of going back out for another several days.
We had reserved just a basic room – some of which are quite nice, like the one we had prior to our boat trip – perfectly cute and comfortable. But it was Sunday afternoon, Valentines Day, in the middle of a 3-day weekend (President’s Day). The only room still available was their absolute worst room. It was a downstairs unit of a 2-story building, across the street from the rest of the resort. It only had one high window that faced a vacant lot, and the room smelled musty.
You would think that we would just be grateful for a shower and a bed that didn’t rock with the swells, but I can be surprisingly discouraged when I don’t get a good vibe from my hotel room. I did my best to try to like the room and told myself to quit being spoiled and entitled, but frankly, I wished we had stayed an extra night on the boat! The weather hadn’t turned rough yet, we could have had one more nice day. Regret!
First thing the next morning I was on the phone to the front desk hoping to get a better room as the long-weekenders left and the resort quieted down. They didn’t have any basic rooms coming available, but they did have an upgraded room coming open that afternoon (for a chunk more money).
I’m like, yes please! Do you need my credit card number again? Let’s do this! (You only live once, right?) And think of all the money we saved sleeping on a boat for 4 nights, not to mention sleeping in rest areas on the freeway on the way out. Plus, it was still a modest room. It was expensive, but not nearly as expensive as their premium rooms, which are small apartments with private decks and full kitchens. Now that would be fun someday.
Even though our room itself was disappointing, there was a pretty area in back along the canal where we ate our breakfast the next morning, while waiting for our new room to come available.
While eating breakfast I spent a long time on the phone with the cancer center in Tucson, trying to get my appointments scheduled for when we return. I have to do bloodwork and a CT scan as soon as I’m back. I’m grateful to be on vacation, but the cancer is still lurking back there; it’s a reality that never goes away.
Our new room is wonderful! Large, with both a mini-fridge and a microwave and a little breakfast nook table. The table will be very handy because I plan to work on Monday and Tuesday afternoon.
And it had three windows! They don’t advertise number of windows, but that’s how I judge a room. How many windows?
And it is also a waterfront room – the window above the table faced the water. What a perfect place to work! A beautiful room. I love this room! Best upgrade ever! Now I don’t want to leave.
Finally, on our third night, we didn’t ground the boat at low tide. I guess we finally got that figured out! Although we did have yet another wild rocking & rolling night.
The next morning was calm, we were treated to huge flocks of birds feeding at low tide:
After awhile they flew away:
Early morning fishing waxes into late morning fishing…
Then it’s time to go find a better anchorage! We want to be deep enough to stay afloat at low tide, AND be out of the wind, AND enjoy the stability of calm waters.
Here’s an idea; it’s probably deep enough, definitely protected from the southeast winds as well as from swells from either the Gulf to the north or the Atlantic to the south.
Off we go!
We had noticed another sailboat anchored some ways from us overnight. It’s a larger sailboat than ours and it spent the night anchored further out. This boat is a ketch with two masts; a main mask forward and a shorter mizzen aft (behind). We passed close by it on our way out, but I don’t like taking close-ups of other people’s boats. It doesn’t seem polite 🙂 So here it is from a distance.
Sailing along to our next destination!
Here’s a short video John took of us sailing.
Here’s a picture of an app that shows us how fast we’re sailing; 5.2 knots per hour, which is about 6 miles per hour. John says that’s “whipping along for a boat our size.”
Will we continue to progress through our slow learning curve and improve on our anchorage once more?
Here we are at our new anchorage. I’m hoping for a quiet night tonight!
After arriving, we went kayaking shortly before dusk. You can barely see our sailboat way out there in the center of the picture.
These are mangrove trees. They are tolerant of salty water and continuously waterlogged mud.
We are feeling humbled by two nights of grounding the boat. It’s a complete rookie mistake. And we did it twice in a row! Hello, do we even know how to sail at all?
We moved the boat to the north side of the island, hoping to get into deeper water and also out of the southeast wind.
Even before we grounded onto rocks early this morning, we had a rough water, causing the boat to bounce around all night long. It’s definitely less windy on this side of the island, but it is still choppy.
The day was warm and we braved the cold water briefly, just long enough to snap a picture or two. Doesn’t that look amazing?
John actually went swimming. Brrrr.
We went kayaking.
And finally, some time to just sit peacefully.
And time to fish!
John mostly does catch and release, but that night when he caught a snapper he asked me if I wanted it.
Sure! If he cleaned it, I’d eat it. At first I felt bad for the fish. But after it was filleted and in the pan, I had no trouble enthusiastically seasoning and cooking it.
I know, canned mushrooms are a bit lame, but we’re on a boat, with no refrigeration! You should be amazed that I even had mushrooms.
That night was fairly calm, but there were side swells causing the boat to rock side-to-side. When a boat is on anchor it swings until it’s facing into the wind. When swells are created by the local wind, they run in front of the wind, perpendicular to the wind. In this case, the boat takes the swells head-on when at anchor, which causes the least amount of rocking.
But sometimes the orientation of the swells is not caused by the local winds. The swells could be caused by winds somewhere else, or by landforms or by other connected bodies of water (such as the ocean). In these cases, swells can be running parallel to the wind direction instead of perpendicular in front of the wind. The swells can be unexpected directions in the Keys because of the differing influence of both the Gulf and the Atlantic.
On anchor the boat orients itself pointing into the wind, so if the swells are running parallel to the wind, the boat take the swells along its side, rather than facing into them. Side swells can cause huge amount of side-to-side rocking of the boat, making it very difficult to sleep!
When we anchored the previous afternoon, the water seemed plenty deep enough and we were quite far from the nearest island. The only issue was fairly large swells which were not going in the same direction as the wind, resulting in crazy bobbing of the boat. We assumed that as night fell the wind would die down and the boat would resume its typical slow, slight bobbing at anchor which does not impede moving around, writing, and sleeping.
Meanwhile the water was quite rough and I am grateful to have enough recovered core strength to be able to move around on the boat. It is very cramped and it takes a lot of maneuverability, strength and flexibility just to do everyday tasks like find where I left my phone! It’s even more challenging to get myself from the sailboat into the kayak, and then back again. That’s certainly something I would not have been able to do a few short months ago!
After our kayak trip to the beach, we came back and fixed some dinner. I talked with Serenity on the phone and afterwards, worked on my blog.
We found out today that Serenity was exposed to covid on Monday evening. I’m trying not to worry about it, because my worrying doesn’t help anything at this point. But obviously I’m concerned.
Luckily I was comfortable enough going to bed, even though I had been claustrophobic the night before. We propped the forward hatch (above my bed) open slightly to help me not get claustrophobic. We also set up a little nightlight so it wasn’t pitch black in our cabin.
Unfortunately, the boat was still rocking and rolling when we went to bed. It was moving around so much that I couldn’t sleep on my side or else I would roll back and forth with the boat. I had to sleep flat on my stomach or back in order to not be tossed around. I would not recommend this trip for anyone with a tendency toward motion sickness! Last night was ridiculous and I’m amazed John and I weren’t nauseous.
In addition to the constant motion, it was incredibly loud as all our lines and stays swayed and banged, and the keel knocked back and forth in its box. We rocked and rolled and clanged all night until suddenly, at 5:30 AM, there was a huge jolt and thump – we had hit a rock! But we didn’t stay on it. We swung off, only to hit it (or another nearby rock) a few seconds later. We were grounding! Dang, the tide was supposed to be high enough here. I couldn’t believe it. Twice in a row!
John got up and winched the keel to its highest position (it had been raised already, leaving only a few inches down, but now we needed every inch we could get). We pulled in the tiller and set it in the cockpit, and raised the outboards, because the previous night we had to dig the tiller out of the mud.
On the previous night when we had grounded in middle of the night, we had simply quietly sunk into the sand. But this time the water was rougher and the bottom was rocky. Instead of eerily sinking into muddy silence, we repeatedly bounced off rocks for an hour.
Finally, at 6:30 AM this morning, we ground into the rocky bottom with a series of tire-on-gravel noises, and stayed there. The boat stilled. John was already up, but I realized it was my perfect chance to catch a few minutes of motionless sleep. I put in a pair of earplugs and blissfully dreamed away an hour while we were grounded, until 7:30 when the banging started back up again.
As the tide returned, the boat started coming up off the rocks, repeatedly swinging into them as the boat slowly gained buoyancy again. Thump, bump, thump, bump.
When I got up, John was wading around in several inches of water, setting a second anchor to keep us from swinging on the main anchor further into the shallows to one side of us.
It’s now mid-morning and we are floating peacefully in a few feet of calm water on anchor, watching all the amazing birds.
There are lots of pelicans, white egrets and cormorants walking along in the shallows. They look like they are walking on water. There’s barely any breeze at all. It’s idyllic. If it had been like this last night I would have slept! All these different conditions, all in the same spot on the same anchor.
At some point today we’re going to have to move and try again to find a decent anchorage. But for now we’re going to work on getting cleaned up. With the rough waves, water had managed to splash up the keel box and onto our carpeted floor. John pulled the carpet up to get it drying on top of the cabin. Below the carpet is a rubber mat, which he also pulled up so he could sponge the wet floor below it. Hopefully we don’t encounter such big swells again.
I tried to get into the water around noon, but it was too cold. I haven’t actually made it into the water this whole trip. I’m starting to question whether we want to store the boat out here as originally planned. I’m actually starting to question whether we even want to own a boat at all!
Maybe we just need to come in a warmer season, rather than at the end of winter? But not so late as to be approaching hurricane season. Maybe later in the spring? Obviously we need to stay in deeper water. I guess what I’m wondering is – are we in a learning curve and this is going to get better, or is the entire premise flawed?
This is our first multi-day trip overnighting in this boat. So far, here’s what I’d do differently:
Warmer season. The low 70’s is wonderfully warm when compared to most of the county in February, and it’s also very comfortable when on dry land. But it isn’t particularly warm when you’re on the water, damp and constantly in the wind.
Obviously, we need deeper anchorages with more thought to wind direction.
We need more room in the boat. We are way too cramped; we need less stuff or a bigger boat. We definitely could get away with a smaller ice chest – it’s huge. We probably don’t need anything in a cooler at all. But if we do want refrigeration, we should get a second solar panel and another battery, and buy a small electric cooler instead of a bulky ice chest.
I could really use a small microwave. Our gas powered stove is prone to dangerous-looking flare-ups and seems hardly worth the space. A backpacking stove would be more useful.
I need more space in my bunk, which means half as much luggage. I definitely brought too many clothes. Especially too many clothes that don’t perform well when damp. No more cotton! Sleeping bags are bulky and unnecessary. 2 lightweight non-cotton blankets would be nice; the sheets aren’t quite enough.
The carpet in the cabin is prone to damp funk; we should roll that up before sailing and whenever it is choppy.
The power cable line that goes up inside the mast to power the mast light clangs like a bell about once per second, day and night, whenever the boat is rocking. That has to be fixed before I go out of my mind.
What we did right: Towing a kayak. Well-organized food. Fishing gear for John. Cell tower and some ability to charge electronics. Plenty of fresh water. Plenty of extra gas. Well-functioning, non-smelly, self-contained toilet. Bimini top for shade. Clothespins and all kinds of handy, useful things. John and I are both good at having along useful items just in case. (Which is why we have too much stuff and are too cramped). Instant coffee! A lifesaver. This is no time to be a coffee snob!
It’s easy to forget the hard parts when it’s so beautiful.
Our day hadn’t started off very well, having gotten stranded by low tide, despite our best navigation efforts.
Here’s what we’re using for navigation – these three examples are from Wednesday.
After the tide came back in and we finally got underway, we had a beautiful sail. Initially we had to motor due to shallow waters, a narrow channel, and unfavorable winds.
But soon we were getting our sails up!
Here you can see how the boat heels over when under sail. The the horizon is horizontal, but not the boat.
More mesmerizing water.
John’s happy.
I’m happy.
The kayak’s happy.
The water is amazing.
I’m sure you’re all bored with the repetitive pictures of water, but that’s all I care about. That’s why I’m here, putting up with the lack of creature comforts, the cramped damp, the constant motion, the uncertain weather and tides. Just look at that water!!!
And I’m not posting even a fraction of how many pictures of the water I actually took!
Here we are at our second anchor.
This time we think our tide tables are right.
The water is going to go down tonight but we should still stay floating. It’s at 5 feet now and should stay above one foot at the lowest, says John.
You can see we’ve got some wind, 10-20 mph. It’s choppy out there!
Just like yesterday, after we got anchored we took off in our kayak. We had a lot of wave action, so getting into and out of the kayak from the boat was a challenge. I’m excited to be getting my core strength back after surgery!
The nearby island wasn’t just mangroves – it had an actual sandy beach. It reminded me of our vacations in the tropics a decade ago, back before we moved to California and back again, and started moving every year and buying rentals and remodeling houses; back before I returned to my environmental science career and was only coaching a few clients, long before my cancer diagnosis, and back when we only had one, young dog, and life was much simpler.
Here I am in my kayaking outfit, lol.
John always has the same outfit.
That’s our boat way out there in the background. Surely we’re far enough out to not run aground tonight, don’t you think?
Here’s the google satellite image of our second anchorage.
Here’s hoping for a better night than our first one!
Turns out I’m not crazy. Although I didn’t think of it in middle of the night, John and I have since calculated that the moment that I woke up in a claustrophobic panic was probably the moment that our boat had quietly grounded. Yep, we were stuck in the mud!
Our tide table was for a nearby channel, and to our surprise, the tides were completely different, even though we were only a few short miles away. I would have thought the tides would be roughly the same for the same general region, but nope, not at all. What we had thought was low tide, was actually high tide. Oops!
During the night the water drained away leaving us to settle into the mud. As the boat sunk into the mud, it would have scraped the hull through the mucky sand one last time and then stilled completely, no longer rocking on the water, triggering my ever-alert subconsciousness to sound the alarm. Stuck! Trapped! Get out, get out!
But in this case, we weren’t in any actual danger. Here’s what it looked like at dawn the next morning.
Here’s our keel stuck in the mud.
The prop is barely above the mud.
We were sitting on bottom. Even our kayak was aground.
Luckily we hadn’t tipped sideways at all. Our boat is fairly flat-bottomed. Good thing our keel was up! There was nothing to do except feel foolish and wait for high tide. We had breakfast and watched the birds walk around on the mud. We even saw a raccoon venture out. He was too far away for a photo, but we got a good view of him through our binoculars. We had a relaxing morning waiting to float.
At first we were patient with it. It was very beautiful.
Oh no, is that rain headed our way?
Yep.
At this point I was having a difficult time of it. I hadn’t slept well, and now we were stuck, and it was cold and rainy!
But the sun came back out.
And the water slowly started coming back in.
Nothing to do now except sit around and take pictures.
We looked at our charts to decide where to go next. Because we couldn’t stay here!
My subconscious was rightfully concerned last night. Boats are supposed to be floating!
The strangest thing happened to me in the middle of the night. I’m fairly accustomed to sleeping on little boats, and in little camper vans, and in tiny tents. I’ve never had problems with it before. But Thursday morning at 1:30 AM I suddenly woke up with the clear and immediate sense that I needed out. Like now. Get out! Out!
I stood up, grabbed my phone and turned on the light. I tried to open our hatch door to the cockpit, which slides across the top of the boat, but it got stuck up against the solar panel on the top of the boat. I had to talk myself down to keep from panicking.
Meanwhile John had woken up and understood that for some reason I needed out. He helped me slide the hatch under the solar panel. I got out into the cockpit and took a few deep breaths. For a moment, as I stood there trying to calm down, I felt a surge of panic about being stuck on the boat in that vast expanse of water. For a brief instance I had a strong urge to get completely off the boat. That would have been a problem because there was nowhere to go. But luckily reason prevailed. After a moment or two of standing in the night air breathing slow and deep, I was ok again.
I don’t know what happened. I guess it was claustrophobia. I don’t know why I woke up with it and why it came on so suddenly. I had fallen asleep in the cabin just fine. It was possible I was nauseous, because small boats rock all night long on the water. Or it’s possible some shift in the noises spooked me.
In addition to constant rocking, sailboats make constant noises all night long. Wind howls, water slaps the sides, the lines slap the mast, the keel thunks back and forth, pulleys clang into things; all these noises are constantly changing but never stop. So something might have changed to alarm my subconscious.
All I know is it’s never happened before. I also know that I’ve had some new psychological issues ever since the start of chemo – starting a couple of days after the my first (and only) injection of oxaliplatin and dexamethasone; presumably not helped by subsequent rounds of capecitabine. So great, now I’m claustrophobic?
It’s true, the sleeping berths are small and the roof very close to our heads. Here’s where I sleep. Where you see ropes hanging down – that’s a hatch that opens for fresh air. It’s not one you could easily get out of, but it’s big enough to stick your head out. I sleep with my feet in the bow and my head next to the sink (where you see the drinks in their holders).
And here’s where John sleeps – his feet way down in there, his head out on that orange pillow.
After a few minutes of standing outside under the stars, I went back to bed and opened the hatch above my bed. That gave me a lot of air flow, and also allowed me to sit up and put my head out the hatch if I needed to. Eventually I went back to sleep.
The next morning I stuck my head out the hatch to look around. It was beautiful.
Finally, it’s the morning of our departure! It’s a fine sunny morning with a stiff onshore breeze. We get all our stuff loaded.
The Bimini top is up and the mainsail is uncovered and ready to go.
Sink, sleeping berth, toilet, gas stove. In the middle is the keel, more about that later.
We had quite a time getting out of our slip. We messed up the cast-off, and the onshore wind blew the boat broadside, shoving the outboard motor almost up against the cement dock. We had the outboard motor on, but we didn’t have enough momentum yet to counter the wind. We’re towing our kayak, and it got blown to the dock edge next to the boat, and the kayak line almost fouled the prop (motor propellor).
An onlooker grabbed the bow line while John was in the boat trying to gain control with the outboard, which left me to leap into the water to fend the boat off the dock and try to keep the kayak out of the way. The water was only a couple of feet deep but it was gross muck and the prop was spewing mud. It was all very messy and not a graceful start to our trip!
The amusing thing was, I had just finished telling our friendly onlooker that no matter what happens, I was not jumping in! Ten minutes later, I jumped in, lol.
At first we motored along, because it was too shallow to put down our keel. Sailboats need a heavy keel that goes deep into the water to balance the pressure of the wind on the sail above. We can pull our keel up with cables and a winch, which allows us to go in shallow water. But we can’t sail with the keel up.
Also the wind wasn’t a favorable direction and the channel was initially too narrow to tack. Tacking is how sailboats go against the wind. First you go a bit too much to one direction for awhile, then you turn and go a bit too much in the other direction for awhile, in a zigzag pattern, allowing you to go upwind. But in order to zigzag, you need a wide path, which we didn’t have. So we motored until we could get into deeper water.
Here we are, motoring along towing the kayak.
The water was amazing colors.
That’s an electric trolling motor you see behind John. We have two outboard motors hanging off the back end of the boat. The gas outboard is for making actual progress. The electric trolling motor is for going very slow while fishing.
More pictures of green water. A lot of this trip so far has been difficult for me, but I cannot stare long enough at that water.
The channel is now deep and wide enough to sail, and there’s plenty of wind.
The keel is up due to the shallows, so in order to sail we’ll need to lower it.
Now partway lowered:
Keel most of the way down:
John goes on deck to prepare the jib. The jib is a smaller sail at the front of the boat, that’s not attached to the mast except at the top. Meanwhile, I’m handling the lines (control ropes) and the tiller. We steer with a wooden tiller that hangs off the back of the boat, rather than a wheel.
Here we have the jib up and the mainsail almost ready. There’s just a few ties keeping it from flopping everywhere. The mainsail is already on the boom, which is the bar parallel to the boat that’s attached to the mast.
We’ve arrived at our first destination! We open the front hatch for ventilation and install our solar panel so I can charge my computer. The solar panel keeps the battery charged, from which we run the lights and a USB outlet for charging our electronics. We are not using our electric trolling motor because our solar panel is inadequate for that. We would need the boat docked with plug-in electric power at night in order to charge the battery enough to use the electric motor.
First thing we did after anchoring was go on a short paddle around in the kayak. There’s our current home!
After a couple of hours we noticed that the tide didn’t seem to be matching our tide tables. The tide was going out when we were expecting it to go in. Huh. That could be a problem in these shallow waters.
The sunset was beautiful!
After dark I settled in and talked with some friends on zoom – yes, I had enough cell tower to create an internet hotspot – just barely, but enough!
Meanwhile John got onto the internet to figure out why our tide table seemed to be wrong. Why is the tide going out now, and how low is it going to go?
Look at the heavy morning dew! You never see anything like that in the desert.
Tuesday was our last day at the resort before heading out on our boat. Monday had been a lot of work, and we envisioned a more relaxing day for Tuesday, hanging out enjoying the resort. We were wrong!
Here’s what the top of the boat looks like where the mast attaches:
This is the plate at the bottom of the mast that attaches to the top of the boat. It’s not supposed to be all bent!
John had to removed it, pound it flat, and reattach it. It looked to me like it would just unscrew, but nope. He had to go to the hardware store, buy a drill and new rivets. He then had to drill out the old rivets in order to get the plate removed. He then banged on it with a hammer for some time out in the parking lot, using our trailer as a surface, until it was sufficiently flat. He then re-riveted it to the mast. It took him all morning, but he got it fixed.
Here’s where I spent most of Monday and Tuesday, sitting at a table in front of our hotel room, with a view of the water in the distance. Here I wrote blog posts, talked on the phone and video with my friends, and caught up with emails.
I also did some coaching on Monday and Tuesday evenings, but I took those calls inside.
On Monday and Tuesday I was thinking about what overall story I am telling on my blog about this trip. It has been a varied trip so far, with amazing parts and challenging parts. What perspective am I taking? I value authenticity, but what is authentic? I could make this trip sound terrible, or I could make it sound wonderful, and be completely truthful either way. How do I want to portray my trip? For that matter, how do I want to portray my life?
It occurred to me that the stories I tell about my life not only influence other people’s opinion of me and my life, but they also influence my own opinion about my life. So should I always keep it positive? No, I don’t think so. I could post gorgeous pictures and tell everyone (and myself) how amazing Florida is, but maybe John and I would actually rather be quietly riding our bikes at home? That’s not as fantastic of a story, but is having a fantastic story the goal?
What if John and end up coming out to Florida every year, imagining that’s what we enjoy doing – but we don’t actually enjoy it during the process of doing it? What if we’ve just convinced ourselves that we enjoyed it because it sounds cool and we get beautiful pictures? On the other hand, maybe that long, long drive was worth a blissful kayak trip or two? Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether we enjoyed this trip at the time, because we will get a lot of future satisfaction out of knowing that yes, we went to Florida and sailed around in a tiny boat?
I decided I would like to portray this trip in a reasonably non-judgmental way. By that I mean I want to stop one step short of declaring things good/bad/wonderful/terrible. I will simply describe the trip in a reasonably authentic manner and you can see what you think.
Is this a wonderful trip or a terrible trip? Interesting or maybe not interesting at all? Worth it or not? I’m going to leave those evaluations to you. Some of you would find this trip a nightmare, others would love to come along.
Stay tuned because I believe it’s going to get more interesting here very soon!
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