News from the Trenches

We’ve made our whirlwind tour around the country to take care of family & personal matters before making final preparations to go cruising this year.
We drove to TN on March 16, where we prepped, primed, and painted the porches and doors around the outside of the house. The weather was marginal for painting outside, but by the end of the week, it finally warmed up enough to work.  We also squeezed in a dinner meeting with our friends at the Chattanooga Sail & Power Squadron.  The highlight there was that one of our best boating buddies, Clint & Leigh, just purchased a bigger hole-in-the-water.  They’re in the motor yacht category now, and their new boat has many more things to break & fail.  Nonetheless, we wish them the best.

This is really fun at 70 mph!

We then drove northward for another day to Mansfield OH to take care of Sue’s uncle’s affairs.  Her uncle is doing OK in a nursing home, but we had to clean out the storage unit which still held his belongings from a year ago.  Sue placed an ad on Craig’s List to sell his motorized wheelchair, which was picked up by a scammer in Canada.  The scammer put forth all his lies and sob stories before finally asking Sue to wire money to cover the shipping charges.  After he claimed that he deposited money in Sue’s PayPal account, a quick phone call confirmed his lie.  He even sent Sue a fake email from PayPal with their logo and everything.

I was surprised to see piles of white crap still on the ground in OH!  As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get them to change into powder-white sand dunes of Florida.  And just to rub salt into the wound, on the drive back south, we ran into a mini snow blizzard just south of Cincinnati.  40 mph winds with snow coming down so hard that visibility was reduced to 100 yards at times.  Seems like ol’ man winter just ain’t gonna go away!

Next was New Orleans, where Sue took care of her medical check-ups & also got her “Oma fix” by spoiling our granddaughter for 4 days.  After some doughnuts, a movie, some carnival rides, and a huge ice cream cone, she was on a severe sugar-high, and we returned her to her parents! 

Finally, in case we ran out of things to do, we began notifying the myriad of people of our change of address to Florida.  Since the house in TN is for sale, and since we live on our boat, we needed to find some state somewhere to claim legal residence, so we can keep paying taxes to someone.  We decided to use a mail-forwarding service in Green Cove Springs FL to receive all our mail & then send it to a marina or general delivery post office as we travel.  So on our way back to the boat this week, we’ll stop at the Clay County Court House to change all our paperwork to a Florida address. 

At that point, we’ll have just two weeks to provision the boat & do final trip planning.  Looking forward to being on the boat & traveling northward to Chesapeake Bay this summer.

Working down the Checklist

A good sailor know how to swab!

As any good engineer, I have a checklist of chores to do around the boat.  Sometimes it gets so good (or bad) that I have lists of my checklists!  One of the major items we wanted to do this winter is to get the canvas all around the sundeck and the flybridge re-stitched.  Over the years, the UV light degrades the thread around the zippers and the Eisenglass, so about every 3-5 years, they need some work.  Additionally, we had some juveniles around the boat last summer who really tore up what was already fragile.

I couldn’t find a canvas contractor in the Orlando/Sanford area, but found one in Daytona Beach (an hour away) who would do the work if we brought the canvas to her.  Now, taking down this much canvas is not something you do just for fun.  The last time we did it was in August 2012 as we prepared for a hurricane to hit us in the New Orleans area.  It takes about a day to take it all down, and another day to clean all the algae and mildew off of it.  And after it’s all repaired, it takes another day to re-hang it all.  And when you try to zip and snap it all together, you’d think a sadist designed & assembled it originally.  We have to wait for a warm day when the canvas will stretch to make it all fit.  So, we entertained ourselves for the better part of a week on this task.

My Admiral disappeared into the
bowels of the boat!

The other major project was to remove, clean, and re-bed the stainless side handrails along the main deck.  As we removed the rails, it was obvious that they had never been re-bedded during the 27-year life of the boat.  Normally, one would re-bed outdoor hardware every 5-10 years to prevent water leaks.  So as I start unscrewing the first handrail, I find that I’m working on a machine bolt that must have a nut on the other end.  Great!  Now I have to find where in the heck the other end is.  After unloading everything in the storage compartments under the seating on the flybridge, we find all the nuts (which are metric, of course).  And just because you can see most of the bolts & nuts, that doesn’t mean that you can REACH them!  Sue had to climb into some cubby-holes that we didn’t know existed.

Along the lines of wildlife entertainment, for the second straight day, our girlfriend landed on the piling right next to the boat to show off.  She is only 3' away from the stern of the boat, so we get some really good views of her.  She matches exactly the pictures in our guide book:  a female Anhinga in her breeding colors (we call her ol' blue eyes).  You can't see the white stripes on her wings, but they look really colorful.

Our friendly "snake bird"

Anhingas are also called "snake birds" because they swim very low in the water & all you see is the neck looking like a snake.  They dive under the water for long distances to catch fish, and actually fly with their wings under water.  They are not an oily bird, so their feathers get water-logged & they must spend a lot of time with their wings spread to let the sun dry them.  We’ve seen lots of them from the Gulf Coast all along Florida.

Invasion of the Roach Coaches

The Roach Coach is the name given to the food trucks that show up at noon time at the gate of a manufacturing plant, especially one located far from town.  It gives the worker-bees an option to bringing their brown bags for lunch every day, BUT the quality of the food is questionable at best.  So, I was definitely surprised last Saturday night when a dozen Roach Coaches set up shop in the vacant lot across from the marina.  How could anyone VOLUNTARILY eat at these things, especially on a Saturday night?!?  Since my Admiral was looking for an excuse to quit our projects around the boat, we meandered over to join the crowd to see what we were missing.

Turns out that these were “gourmet” Roach Coaches that actually served edible food, everything from gourmet ice cream to sandwiches from El Salvador.  One coach had photos of their owner, taken with several famous chefs such as Paula Deen and Emeril.  And the food that we tried was very tasty.  So, who’d a thought that the bustling metropolis of Sanford Florida would host, every month no less, a coagulation of Gourmet Roach Coaches!

Yesterday was Mardi Gras.  I’m sure y’all remembered to wear your Purple, Green & Gold!  We had invited some good boating friends to our boat to tell us of their vast experience cruising the Chesapeake Bay (that’s our goal for this summer).  Don & Becky live on their boat in Daytona Beach, and we visited them last summer as we cruised northward along Florida’s East Coast.  In addition, they used to live in the New Orleans area, where we first met them when Don taught the US Power Squadrons weather class and Sue & I were just meek & humble students.  So, yesterday they show up wearing Mardi Gras beads around their necks & bring Sue and me our set of Purple, Green & Gold.  We wore them when we ate lunch at the nearby German restaurant & we got lots of stares & smiles.



A happy, but soaked, Mardi Gras
reveler, holding the prized Zulu coconut



Of course, we had to text our son & his family, living in New Orleans, to see how they are celebrating Mardi Gras.  Even though it was 45 degrees & raining, the party went on (Laissez les bons temps rouler!)  They went to the Zulu parade, and our wonderful, special, perfect granddaughter got one of the hallmarks of the parade – a 2014 Zulu coconut!  If you don’t have fun at Mardi Gras, it’s your own damn fault!

We have a litany of projects to do on the boat in the next 10 days.  We then drive back to TN to work on the outside of the house (which is up for sale), before we head farther north to Ohio to visit Sue’s uncle in a nursing home.  Sue is trustee of his property (in addition to being responsible for her mother’s health & finances), and we’ll spend 2 days taking care of things.  The end of March will find us in the Big Easy for medical appointments & Sue getting her “Oma fix” with our granddaughter.  Mid-April we’re looking forward to a visit from my sister-in-law and her daughter’s family here in Orlando.  They will spend a week in town acting like tourists, bringing lots of that good Yankee money.  Additionally, my sister will fly down at the same time for about a week to go cruising with us as we depart Sanford FL heading northward.  She’ll ride with us down the St John’s River as far as Jacksonville, & then fly back home to that cooooold Michigan winter.

It’s time to start thinking about CRUISING!!