Big boats

Fort Lauderdale is filled with BIG BOATS. Some of these monsters were parked within dinghy distance so I took a short tour of “battleship row” so to speak. It appears to me that the pastime of most of the crews is to clean the boat! I’ll put more mega yacht pictures on the Picasa web album.

Rainy day

Most of the time, since we’ve started the long trip up north to the Chesapeake Bay area, the weather has been great but today there was a front coming through with lots of rain so we stopped off at Sylvia Lake (in Fort Lauderdale) to wait out the rain. Sylvia Lake is really a wide spot next to the intercostal waterway that is surrounded by million dollar homes and big beautiful boats. When the rain hit Anna and Russ (who has been with us for a few days) both decided to take a shower out in the rain. Anna won’t let me show the pictures of her “rain dance” so, I’ll show you how hard it was raining. Even though the pictures look like evening it was the middle of the day when they were taken. The two full buckets were for Edie and her bath later that day. Edie got her bath but also managed to give me one too!

Close encounter

Today, Anna and I and another couple took our dinghies on a boat trip up into the mangroves. At one point the bottom was stirred up and we thought that it was from our friend’s dinghy that had just gone before us but, as it turned out, it had been stirred up by a family of manatees! Just around the next bend we came upon them, four adults and one youngster! We stopped and watched them slowly glide through the water. The young one came up to our dinghy and let me scratch its back and shake its flipper. This was one of the coolest things that have happened to me on this whole trip. We'll post all the pictures in the album.

Stuck on shore

We use the cell phone system for our internet connection and that allows us to use the computer while on the boat. Overall, its worked well but sometimes, I have to rely on the computer wireless connection,,, like right now. You see, I’ve been kicked off the boat for the morning. Both Anna and I have done this to each other when we need the boat to ourselves. I normally to do it when I have major work that will (for a short time) create a general mess in the living area and Anna, when she and a girl friend are doing crafts or other such stuff and they don’t want me traipsing around. So, seeing that I’ve been sentenced to shore for a few hours, this is as good time as any to go through the 400+ pictures from the air show and reduce them to something manageable for our website.

More dinghy repair

I know, this is getting old but, it’s life when you have a used car. Our dinghy is made of PVC, the pulse side of this is that it’s light the bad side of it is that the seams tend to delaminate after a while. (Dinghies built of Hypalon hold together much better than ones built of PVC). Well, we were getting a lot of water into the dinghy whenever we took it for a ride so I finally flipped it over and found that the rear corner was delaminating. Two hours later, the final patch went on and our dinghy was renamed, “leaky boat II” and is back in the water ready for business.

Airshow

We went to the “Southern most Air Show” this Sunday down at Key West and got our ears blown out! The static displays of planes were excellent. The flying was great and at times, even spectacular. I was amazed to see planes actually tumbling end over end in the sky or being placed into zero velocity, inverted flat spins and still pull out. Parachuters, wing walkers, precision flying by a dozen small planes. Old WWII navel aircraft floating by in precision formations, giant cargo planes leaping into the air, acrobatic flying that should have ripped the wings right off the plane and Jets… Lots of jets! Ear splitting, body shaking, ripping the very air that you breathed apart, Jets! Their after burners glowing red in the noon day heat as they tore the air apart at 750 ft/sec. Then, the main show cranked up, the Navy Blue Angles. I have to admit that they know how to put on a show. Precision flying, ground shaking thunder, passed so tight that from our angle it appears that they will collide all set in a blue sky filled with high white clouds. What a show. We will put a lot more pictures on Picasa in a few days. Hope you like them!

Dinghy docks

Using the dinghy as your car is a bit of a challenge. First, there's the challenge of making it across the rough water on your way into the docks and then second, is to find a parking place when you get there. Most of the time this isn’t too hard to do but the other day I had a 10 minute wait because all of the dock space was filled! The dock space is limited here and almost everyone has a larger dinghy’s than we do. The first time that we came ashore at Key West, we found a place in the back to park. By the time we had returned (a few hours later), a much larger dinghy had parked across the fairway and blocked us in. We had to pull our way out by going under the docks, shoving others aside and working our way back to clear water. As you can see, with dinghies like this beauty, the available space gets taken up rather fast!

Shelling

One of the things that we do on Snow Goose that has turned out to be an interesting past time is shelling. Anna has managed to find some of the most fascinating shells that you could ever imagine. Almost every color of the rainbow can be found if you take the time to walk slowly and look. While at the Boca Grande Island we found an assortment of shells and here are just a few of the ones that we found.

Anchoring

When we sailed to Boca Grande Island today, the recommended place to anchor was on the north side of the island. The problem with this location was that it’s a channel that drains the “flats” area behind the island. Twice a day the tides go in and out through this channel. That’s a lot of water for a small channel. When we got here, the tide was running full at 3 kts! That is ½ of our normal cruising speed. I decided to use the Bahamian method of anchoring. That’s where you put out two anchors, one up current and another one down current so that when the current switches direction, (and you switch direction), the boat will still have an anchor that is “upstream” of your boat. It’s a bit of a hassle but, with the Goose secured in both directions it made sleeping much easier.

Wind

We’re in Key West, or I should say were anchored in the harbor area to the north of Key West. A strong cold front has gone through and the wind has switched from strong SE to S to SW to W to NW and now, this morning, it's north! This all happened in a 24 hour span, the problem is that the anchorage has no protection from NW and N so, last night, we pitched up and down as the anchor line pulled tight and the 2 footers rolled beneath us. The harbor was filled with “white horses”. (That’s when the top of a wave crests and makes a bit of white foam on top of the wave). From a distance it looks like bits of white scattered across the top of the water. So, last night as we watched one of the ‘Harry Potter’ movies and the movie came to the quiditch match, we sat and watched the characters soar up and down thru the air and it felt like “3-D” inside of the boat as we moved up and down with them. Life on a boat is anything but boring!