Sunday 3/6/2016
I decided that I had been looking through dirty windows on the boat long enough. I do not remember the last time I took the time to clean them - somewhere in Tennessee I think. With all the wind blowing who-knows-what around the marina here in Marathon plus the salt spray from our recent outing, the boat and the windows had become covered in grime, dust, and salt.
It made no sense to me to clean the windows if the boat was dirty because as soon as we did clean the boat, the dirty wash water would spray up on the clean windows. Therefore, in my opinion, to get to the window cleaning job, I had to wash the boat first. I got up early to tackle the job before the heat of the day - early for me being by 8:00 a.m. As soon as I had eaten breakfast, I got out there with my bucket of boat wash and started scrubbing.
Normally cleaning the boat is Clark's job. Given his obsession with keeping the boat clean when we are boating in New Jersey, I have been surprised by his lack of interest in cleaning the boat on this trip. I do understand it, however, since keeping the boat clean on this trip has been next to impossible. If it's not spider droppings then it is bird mess or the nasty ring around the boat sometimes referred to as the "looper mustache". No matter how hard one works at it, the boat immediately needs to be cleaned again almost as soon as the job is done.
I worked on cleaning the boat for the better part of the day. Clark set off early in the day to go find Krogen Express owners to talk to. I was happy to see him go since that meant I would have the boat to myself while I cleaned. Sadly for me, however, he came back no more than 15 minutes later saying that he had found someone who told him to come back at 3:00 to talk.
Phooey! Right away he started "looking over my shoulder" and giving me input on the boat cleaning job. He wanted to compound and wax a section of the boat. I explained to him that I needed to wash the boat first. He said that some sections would only become clean with compounding. I told him I had looked forward to him being gone for hours and that he needed to go find something else to do! He decided to shut himself in the boat and work on taxes. That made me extremely happy.
Once I get started on a big job like that I don't want to stop in the middle. I scrubbed the boat from bow to stern until I was satisfied with the job and then we had a late lunch just before 2:00. While we ate lunch, Clark asked me for some information for the tax forms so I pulled my computer out and looked up what I could from my records.
At 3:00 I reminded him of the time and he abandoned the tax forms to go seek out Krogen Express owners to talk to. I decided that I had had enough on-the-boat time for the day and went with him. He found the owner who had told him to come back at 3:00. Personally I felt it was like pulling teeth to get any information out of him. It seemed to me pretty clear that he did not want to be bothered talking to us.
After Clark got extremely limited information from him we strolled further down the dock and met owners of two other Krogen Express boats. One couple was Dutch and only spent a part of each year in the states on their boat. The other owners we talked to are from Omaha, Nebraska. They were much more inclined to chat and could provide answers to the type of boat performance questions that Clark had. We met both the husband and wife and found them quite pleasant to talk to. They have traveled the world - mostly in their own private plane and some by boat. Sometime in the not-too-distant past they took their boat to Cuba and had a lot to say about the effects of communism on that country.
Around 5:00 I left Clark talking to Krogen Express owners and started back to the boat. As I passed by the pool area, however, Ben called out a big hello to me, so I walked over to talk with Ben, Jane (Jammin Jane) and Deb (Haley's Comet). I was still there an hour later when Clark walked by on his way back to our boat. I said that I needed to clean the boat windows when I excused myself from the Krogen Express conversation. Clark made a comment that I hadn't gotten very far on my windows when he saw me chatting by the pool.
I never did get to the windows on Sunday. I made dinner on the boat and then read my Kindle for a while. By 9:00 I was falling asleep with the "book" in my hands. 9:00 is "looper midnight". It certainly felt like the real midnight to me. I went to bed. That has got to be the earliest to bed for me on this entire trip.
A fishing boat with six relatively young guys on it had left the slip next to ours at 9:00 a.m. When I retired for the night, they had not returned, so I thought they were not coming back. They did come back though at 10:00 p.m. in the dark with a hearty wind. Clark ran out to help them with their lines as they docked. Apparently they found the waters rough and the fish they sought not biting, so I gather it was not the best of fishing trip experiences for them.
Day 240
Sunday 3/7/2016
When I woke in the morning, I could hear people talking and it sounded like whoever they were they were right outside my porthole. By the time I got up and got dressed and looked around outside I could see no signs of anyone and wondered who I had heard. I did not know that the guys had come in at 10:00 last night. Clark told me it was them that I had heard talking, but they had gone back out fishing again before I got myself outside.
Since I never got around to my main objective for yesterday of cleaning the boat windows, I decided to tackle that job today. Clark had his own agenda. When we went out for our run to Sombrero Reef, he discovered a potential problem with the starboard propeller. Getting the propellers pulled off the boat and into a repair shop was at the top of his priority list with a few other agenda items mixed into his plans for the day.
Fairly early he set off on his bike to go visit "Prop Tec of the Florida Keys" which fortunately for us is just a short distance from our marina. He discussed the symptoms he experienced on our test run of the boat, and the prop tec person told him that it may mean a "pitch" problem. He gave Clark the name of a person who could dive under the boat to remove the props. When Clark called him, he was very pleasantly surprised to learn that the prop-puller person could come today at 2:00.
Clark biked all up and down Marathon today and visited several stores. He went to a hardware store, a Napa auto parts store as well as an Autozone, West Marine, the Marathon Marine Supply store, and a Radio Shack (not necessarily in that order). He was busy. He said that the high winds coming from the east made traveling to the stores hard work. Traveling back was a "breeze"! No pun intended?
All the while Clark was gone, I busily worked on washing my windows and hatch covers. Besides washing the windows, I treated them with RainX which I learned at an AGLCA rendezvous works well to repel future dirt and stains. I washed the hatch covers with water, then used 201 plastic cleaner, and finally applied 201 plastic repair which is supposed to remove scratches. I say supposed to since I saw no major before-and-after differences.
I got a text message from Clark at 12:15 saying "Heading back from RainX store by airport". My immediate reaction was that I hoped he had not had to travel all that way to buy RainX as that seemed rather extreme. As it turned out his other shopping needs took him that direction, so the distance he traveled was not solely my doing thankfully!
When he finally got back to the boat, I made lunch. Since he told me the prop-puller guy was coming at 2:00, I wanted to get lunch out of the way before he showed up. As it turned out he came early, so it was good that we were well done with lunch. I did not want to get involved or get in the way of the prop pulling exercise, so I gathered up all my used towels and headed off to the laundry.
I came back from the laundry about an hour later and the prop guy was gone. I was dismayed to find big, orange rust stains all over the starboard side of the boat. They looked like large hand prints! My yesterday-it-was-spotless boat already needs to be cleaned again!!
When I climbed on board, I found Clark in our second stateroom with the contents of the room strewn all around the master stateroom and the head. To get the port propeller off the boat Clark had to dig into our hidden storage area to get out his own prop puller. The one that the professional had did not want to work with the port prop even though it worked well on the starboard prop. To get to our hidden storage compartment, everything in the second stateroom (and that is a lot of stuff) had to come out first!
I helped Clark put the room back together. Then he quickly grabbed his shower bag and headed up to the washrooms to clean up after his hard day's labor (biking, shopping, and helping with the prop work). We had an engagement for this evening for an early-bird dinner at a local restaurant with JoAnn and Jim from Namaste -- our neighbors in the slip on our starboard side.
We left just before 5:00 to walk to the restaurant. The company was wonderful, but it was not a pleasant walk to the restaurant. The traffic on Route 1 was very loud especially a deafening group of motorcycles that went by, and we had to walk against the wind that was swirling up as much dust as possible into our faces. The walk to the Steak & Lobster House seemed to take much longer than other times we have walked there.
The early-bird menu is available at the restaurant until 5:30. We arrived at 5:20 and were concerned that we might not have arrived in time, but the waitress said we only needed to be seated before 5:30 to be able to partake of the lower prices. Yay - we were on time! For some restaurants the food has to be ordered before the deadline to qualify.
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| Jim and JoAnn from Namaste with Ev (Clark busy taking picture) |
We had a lovely meal with great company. It was one of those non-stop talking types of meals. The time flew by. We finally left somewhere near 8:00 but it felt like we had been there only minutes not hours. We debated getting a taxi for the return trip to the marina but decided that we had the wind at our backs for the return, so we should get back in no time. In fact the return trip felt much much faster.
JoAnn and Jim came on our boat briefly when we got back to discuss our recent trip to Key West since they have plans to visit there. Afterwards I set to work on the blog, and Clark picked up where he left off yesterday on the taxes.
As I was busy cleaning my windows earlier today, Jim from Namaste was busy sanding and varnishing his boat rail. He looked over at me and said, "It's a good thing we think this is fun; otherwise, it might be considered work!" How right he is!
I anticipate more "fun" tomorrow as I still have not finished my "window" cleaning. The Eisenglass in the full enclosure also needs to be cleaned and polished. That job may need to be postponed indefinitely as, once again, 20 to 25 mph winds are predicted for the next few days. Even with lesser winds, twice today I had to fish my towels out of the salt water since they blew off the boat. Cleaning the full enclosure in 25 mph winds may be a bit over the top even for me.
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