Often we spend our days doing the mundane chores of every day living - taxes, vacuuming, cleaning, etc. On occasion we find work that is unique to living on a boat. For example, I spent the better part of Tuesday this week using a boat hook to push sea grass out of our boat slip. When the north wind blows, massive amounts of sea grass come in and pack in tight around our boat.
With a southerly wind, the grass starts to break up and move back out where it belongs. When it is packed in tight like this week, the wind alone cannot remove the piled up grass. If it sits for too long in the heat, it starts to rot producing fumes and stirring up my allergies.
When I woke in the morning to the sound of Mel's boat running its engines, I knew that he was using the propellers to get the sea grass moving away from his boat. That motivated me to pull out a boat hook and push our grass out towards the bay. I worked at it for an hour. Clark serenaded me on the guitar while I "raked the grass".
When Sandy said she was going to the store, I abandoned my work and went with her for a break. Clark came along to hit the post office along the way to Publix. Upon returning to the boat, I decided to keep working at the sea grass and managed to get a vast majority of it to disappear.
On Wednesday, Clark suggested we take "Sunset Delight" out for its weekly maintenance run. We left around 11:30 to anchor at Pigeon Key for a "picnic" lunch on the cockpit of our boat. As we pulled out of the slip, we left a trail of sea grass following behind us. Apparently, a bunch of it was trapped under the boat and freed itself as we left the slip.
It took less than 30 minutes for us to reach Pigeon Key, and by noon, we were sitting out with sandwiches in hand admiring the view.
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| Anchored near Pigeon Key |
As I stood at the bow of the boat watching the anchor settle into place, I noticed that the boat had grown a bow beard while sitting at the dock.
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| Green Beard on "Sunset Delight" Bow |
As we ate lunch, Clark contemplated going in for a swim to scrape off the bow beard. From experience, we knew that it was not coming off without serious help. We had some time before we had to be back at Faro Blanco, so he decided to go for it. With a water temp of 75 degrees, he decided he did not need a wet suit.
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| Clark climbing in off the swim platform |
He worked his way up the port side, cleaning as he went.
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| Scraping off the greenery on the bow! |
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| There it goes - no more beard! |
Clark had difficulty holding himself near the boat while he scraped. He kept floating away. He could just manage to stay near on the port side, but when he switched over to the starboard side he needed some assistance to fight the current. I suggested that I drop a line down for him to hold on to. He took me up on that offer. The camera went away and a line came out. I held it short and tight, so he could hold himself in close enough to the boat to scrape the hull and not keep drifting away.
As soon as he was done scraping, we pulled up anchor and headed back to the marina. We had a very important date. Dave and Beverly, "Amelie", have a car and invited us to join them at 3:00 to go for ice cream at Sweet Savannah's.
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| Dave, Beverly, and Ev at Sweet Savannah's! Yummy! |
When Dave and Beverly invited us out for ice cream on Wednesday, they also invited us to join them on Thursday for a dinghy ride and lunch at a local restaurant. We decided on a trip to Lazy Days restaurant. We left around 10:45 and decided to go for lunch first and then dinghy exploring afterwards to avoid finding the restaurant super busy. My salad contained enough food to serve as my lunch as well as my dinner. I took more than half of the salad "home" with me.
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| Clark, Dave, Beverly, and Ev at Lazy Days for lunch |
Since it seemed a little less "bumpy" on the bay side, we went back under the 7-mile bridge to explore the marinas to the east of Faro Blanco. We explored the boat basins at Marlin Bay, Blackfin, Banana Bay, and Tranquility Bay. We saw some boats we recognized. However, due to the high heat / humidity, we saw no one we knew. All the boats were closed up with air conditioning running.
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| Planes obviously criss-crossed in the sky |
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| Dave and Beverly |
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| Happy Palm Tree Trunk at one of the marinas |
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| Sometimes they "chased" us and sometimes we followed them |
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| Swimming area at Tranquility Bay |
The weather proved perfect for our dinghy outing and not-so-perfect to be back at the docks. We stayed out on the dinghies, including lunch, for a full three hours. Eventually, however, we had to return to the marina. With high humidity and temperatures in the upper 80s, we found it oppressive to be back on "Sunset Delight". Clark turned on the air conditioning, and we left in our suits for a dip in the pool. We found a few of our boater friends there as well.
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| Valerie, Ann, Clark (goggles only), Ev, Tudy, and Yasmine (notice Clark is the only guy with all us gals!) |
After a very long soak in the cool, pool water, we returned to the now air-conditioned, comfortable boat. On Thursday's we have "heavy hors d'oeuvres" at docktails, so around 5:00 we headed over there to see what we could find to eat.
Weather is supposed to turn around in the next couple days. The forecast predicts much colder temperatures with strong northerly winds bringing a bountiful supply of sea grass! Can't wait!
This week's sunset picture ...
Fav dog picture of the week ...
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| Callie aka "Moo" |
