Gary, who lives on the boat across the dock from us has regaled us with stories about an alligator in the marina that supposedly swims past boats sterns.  Yeah right.  We've seen tons of manatees, dolphins, birds, turtles, even an armadillo, but until today the alligator was always just a rumor.  

As we're packing the boat to leave, David left with yet another load of stuff to take to the truck this afternoon and before I know it, he's back, breathless, "grab your camera, QUICK"!!!   OK, I'm always up to grab my camera -- wonder what this is about?   :)

We get close to the end of our dock and this guy is lounging in the sun!  What?  You mean there really IS an alligator living in our marina?  Mark, the diver, that cleans our bottom, must be CRAZY!  Mark tells stories of being pinned against the seawall by manatees, but never chased by an alligator....

And this guy's not small!  He swam around "D" dock, then over to "E" dock and down by the fuel dock before returning to "D" dock.  Such excitement in the marina!  Wonder if Mark will refuse to clean boat bottoms for the summer....   

Scrub scrub scrub, inside & out ... getting the boat ready to leave for six months.  This boat hasn't been this clean all season!

A commuter cruiser friend, Sharon, on sv Rose of Sharon, in Bocas Del Toro, Panama, yesterday pointed out that she was scrubbing her oven & stove to be clean ... to leave for six months after making it filthy while cruising for the prior six months.   LOL!

I had to laugh as I think about all the cleaning & prep we're doing to leave Winterlude for hurricane season.  Mopping and double-mopping to make sure there's no hint of a crumb left anywhere, scrubbing that stove & oven, emptying all food lockers, scrubbing and then wiping out with bleach water ... the list never ends. 

All this to make absolutely sure there's no way any bugs, ants, roaches, mice, rats or who knows what other critters might decide to invade below while no one's living aboard.   :) 

So we clean clean clean for the BUGS, but while we're living aboard, it's a rare day when I clean .... too much to do, too much fun to have.  And I guess, most bugs & critters don't want to live with us aboard - or at least we've never had a problem when we're living on the boat. 

I am FAR from a clean freak, but when it comes time to leave the boat, I go nuts.   Go figure.    :)

In the meantime, cleaning photos are no fun, better to remember the "aaahhhh" moments when the diesel rumble shut off & we listened to the water lapping at the hull and the wind in the sails!

The Nav-A-Gator Bar & Grill on the Peace River north of Punta Gorda is somewhat of an institution.  We've never been there in all our years in this area.

Eric Stone is a household (boat-hold?) name with sailors.  He plays wonderful music ... live at most boat shows, usually at a free party put on by Bob & Jody Bitchin of Cruising Outpost (formerly Lats & Atts) fame. 

Before today we had never heard him live, even though we own two of his CD's.  So when friends told us he was playing at the Nav-A-Gator Bar from 2 - 5 PM, we decided to drop by after our afternoon at the beach.  What a great idea! 

As an added benefit, I found out that Kim Hess, Eric's new bride of one week, had her Yoga Aboard book for sale.  So, having wanted this book for some time, I wandered up, introduced myself AND bought the very first copy of Kim's "Yoga Aboard" book autographed with her new name, Kim Hess Stone!   As Bob Bitchin would say "how kewl is that!".   If you want one for yourself, visit Tropica Yoga or Amazon, click here.

 

Now that 2 coats of varnish are complete (and alligators slain), the stainless cleaned & the topsides waxed, we're finally getting back to our preferred method of getting the boat ready to leave -- work all morning, play all afternoon!  Working all day every day is a sure recipe for burn-out! 

Today is sad because the sails are off & stored, but...

Sitting sipping coffee in the cockpit, rata-tat-tat ... and again, rata-tat-tat.  What kind of noise is THAT?  We look around and notice not one but two woodpeckers pecking away at a mast of a boat on our dock.  David's theory is that there must be bugs that they're tapping away at ... but they were tapping on the aluminum mast as well as what looks to be the spinnaker halyard.  Not sure how reliable that halyard might be after the torture it endured this morning!  

You learn something new every day.  We have never seen woodpeckers pecking away at the top of a mast.  Lots of ospreys, blackbirds, seagulls and other pesky birds, but never woodpeckers!   Weird! 

This morning was spent finishing up cleaning the stainless, then touching up the varnish where the alligators resided (looks pretty good, btw) and waxing the cabin top.  Lots of not fun, but necessary work!  Luckily the humidity is way down, making it easier.   

In the meantime, at the charter company across from the docks, a Grand Banks trawler pulls in to the dock.  Hmmm... we thought they just chartered sailboats.  We've been toying with the idea of chartering a Grand Banks sometime just to see how the dark side lives, so we walked over to see & got a tour. 

Nice!  Returning to Winterlude, we calculated for this winter's Keys cruise (the shortest ever), we used $275 of diesel.  On a GB 36 (twin Lehman 135 hp diesels) the fuel mileage is estimated online at anywhere from 3 gph to 6 gph -- so our same trip in the Grand Banks trawler would have been over $2,000 in diesel!   YIKES! 

Reality check.  I need my $25 million before considering a trawler!
And the 135 hp Lehman diesels are probably among the most fuel efficient ...

Makes David happy -- he's even waxing more of the cabin top ... I thought we were going to the pool.    :)

Has anyone else noticed that the weather this year is totally weird?  Major snowstorms in April in the midwest ... and the accompanying cold fronts which normally stall out well before south Florida are marching on through ignoring the normal patterns? 

As you can see above, our wind gauge is showing 30 knots ... Below is the forecast for the day.  This was just as we approached the Northwest Channel Sea Buoy northwest of Key West... 

You may not be able to read this, but it says there's nothing in this day over 12 knots ... and mostly 7 or below.  And this was the forecast literally TWO HOURS before we departed Key West ... under FULL sail, of course, with that kind of forecast.  When we left it was blowing 9-10, bright sunny beautiful day.  Nothing to indicate what was about to happen when we reached the sea buoy.  No clouds, no squeezed isobars on the current surface analysis NADA.  And it didn't build gradually, oh no, it went from blowing 10 to WHAMO blowing 30.   No chance to reef before the wind waves were dancing us around. 

And this is the "norm" for this winter's cruising, not the exception.  I just don't get it.  At least this time the wind was from the forecast direction, which is more than I can say for other times when we were anchored on the N side of Bahia Honda because the wind was supposed to blow for the next three days out of the SE ... and instead we woke up to wind from the west on a lee shore ... then 4 hours later, wind from the north for the next 24 hours.... needless to say, we moved to the Johnson Keys where we had a bit of north protection.  And the forecast?  Still saying southeast. 

Am I nuts?  I don't think so.  I don't ever remember a year where the winter fronts were so nasty so late up north and where they didn't weaken when coming south. 

Any weather guru's out there know an explanation?  Is there a nina or nino thing going on?  When I get back to the lake this summer, I'm going to do some more research and see if I can figure out an answer because every cruiser I talk to is singing the same refrain ... how do you make plans when literally two hours before the forecast will change ... again!    Not whining....   well, not too much.  We still had a great time with the limited time we had to cruise the Keys this winter.  But we didn't get to the Marquesas ... again, for the 3rd time.   :( 

Every fall when we return to the boat, we have adding a salt water washdown pump on our To Do list.  And every fall, other priorities take over and the washdown pump always gets pushed back.  You'd think we'd learn!   

Every time we anchor in a muddy/clay/sticky anchorage, David hauls the bucket with the rope to the bow and it takes us forever to get the anchor up while he rinses with the bucket as best he can.

Then every spring when we get back to the marina, we spend a half a day removing the chain from the anchor locker, scrubbing the chain, scrubbing out the anchor locker, the path to the bilge and then the bilge.  I guess it means at least once a year our bilge gets cleaned and dried and that's good.

In the meantime, the saltwater washdown pump is back on our To Do list for October 2013 ... any bets on whether we have a washdown pump next winter?   :)  

Never Approach a Dock Faster ...
Than You Can Afford to Pay for the Damage!!!

Sage advice from the dockmaster at Galleon Marina in Key West!

Or as we'd always heard in the past:  "Never approach a dock faster than you want to hit it".  

It seems like fewer and fewer boaters pay attention to the go slow advice.  Over this past winter, we've been unlucky enough to witness a few incidents such as this -- this one literally moved our boat a foot sideways with a sickening crunch and unbelievable noise.  Luckily he hit the dock and not us, although it was close.
Even more luckily, no one was injured. 

So we try to approach a dock with just enough speed to control the boat.   It's best to just float in and throw a dock line to a dockmaster than to worry about how to get your boat fixed when you're enroute to the Eastern Caribbean.  And besides, you won't give the dockmaster near heart failure as was the case here!

No, not the yummy pickles at the Sand Bar restaurant close to the Factory Bay anchorage in Marco Island.

Pickling refers to what we have to do to the watermaker before we leave the boat for the summer.  

The watermaker magically turns saltwater into drinking water, by the principle of "reverse osmosis";  with a high pressure pump forcing seawater through a series of filters and then a membrane which allows water but not salt to pass.   While aboard, we "fresh water flush" the watermaker once a week if we're not going to be making water - this keeps bacteria from growing inside the membrane.  

When we'll be gone for the summer, it's time to take it a step further & pickle the watermaker.  Although pickling always sounds intimidating and the instructions are horridly convoluted, it's actually not as complicated as it seemed.  First we have to make a bit of RO water so we have absolutely pure water to start the process (we wouldn't have to make some if the tanks were full of nothing but RO water with nothing added, but we'd filled our tanks in Marathon from the water at the marina, so the water was mixed.

Now David puts the chemical that we get from the manufacturer, Spectra, in this case in a bucket and basically lets the watermaker flush out everything in the system and replace it with the pickling solution which insures no bacteria or anything else grows inside while we're off being commuter cruisers. 

Now we just have to remember not to use it, good old blue tape handles that task rather easily.   CHECK, watermaker pickled, on to the next thing in the de-commissioning list!