Releasing the Velcro

After over two months on the dock at Legacy Harbour Marina, departing can be difficult.  In the social tradition of C dock, we had a goodbye happy hour for John and Brenda.

We sadly bade farewell to "Some Dream", since John and Brenda truly are the life of the party.

We then waited over a week for a weather window which would allow us to "sail" down the west coast of Florida.  Finally, on Tuesday, February 15th, in front of a large crowd of C dock friends, we cast off at 8:31 a.m. and were free of the dock!  We motored to the Gulf of Mexico and soon enjoyed a wonderful sail down to Gordon pass and our first night's anchorage at Rookery Channel.  The next morning we met Mike and Pam, who were cruising their wooden motor yacht out of Panama City.  Then Sue and I dingied over to the beach on Keewadin Island and successfully collected many shells.

At noon we left the anchorage and motored the inside route through Marco Island and on to Goodland, the town of few streets and three or four bars.

Since we were looking for wilderness, we kept on going until we reached Panther Key in the Ten Thousand Islands, where we anchored for the night behind Hog Key.  The next morning we dingied over to the beach on Panther Key, escorted by a dolphin who tried to ride our bow wave.  We visited with Mike and Pam, who were exercising their dog Blue.

After collecting a few unique shells, we departed Panther Key at 11:15 a.m. and motored on flat seas, which Lucy really enjoyed.

How relaxed can one cat get?  Lucy is not comfortable in the seas accompaning sailing winds, but loves motoring on flat seas.  I think she wants a trawler.

We arrived at New Turkey Key at about 3:00 p.m.  This tiny island in the Everglades National Park is a designated camp site, which means a porta potty is on the island.  The island is small and the anchorage is shallow.  At low tide our depth meter wouldn't read the bottom, so we must have been in less than 3 feet of water.  We pulled up everything, including the rudders.

There were eight people camping on the island in two sites.  We didn't go ashore here since the island was so small we felt like we would be invading their privacy.

At 10:45 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 18th the tide rose enough for us to raise anchor.  We enjoyed a fabulous sail to the Little Shark River, where we anchored just up the river by 3:30.  We shared this anchorage with two other boats.

I took this picture at sunset, but was driven back into "Passage" by the active biting insect population.

Saturday the 19th we motored all the way from the Little Shark River to Marathon in the Florida Keys.  Finding the mooring balls full, we tried three times to anchor in two locations in the crowded harbor before moving down to Sister Creek and anchoring on two anchors (which we hate) next to five other boats.

We spent three nights on anchor in the creek.  Mike and Lynn aboard the Hunter 31 "She n I" were our next boat neighbors.  The creek was a very secure anchorage with lots of boat traffic during the day and terrible no-seeums in the morning.  We needed a mooring ball to keep from being eaten alive, but the marina was closed on President's Day, which was too bad because a huge fleet of boats left for the Bahamas.

Finally on Tuesday, Feb. 22nd, we were assigned ball N-10.  With the help of Laura and Bill Bender, we easily retrieved our second anchor.  Thanks Laura and Bill!  Then we hoisted our primary anchor and motored the one half mile to our new home.

We checked in, walked to a mart for a loaf of bread, and then climbed the steps to the elevated bar at Keys Fisheries.   Sitting 30 feet off the ground, enjoying a cold beer and looking out over beautiful Florida Bay made us feel real "keysey".  We have arrived.

Bye Bye Minivan

We picked up Becky and Del Gladrow at the airport as scheduled on January 19th.

What followed was a fun filled week of catching up with old friends.  We enjoyed eating out at The Elephant Bar Restaurant and Joe's Crab Shack.  Del and I visited West Marine a few times, one trip resulted in a new grill for Passage, which we used to good effect.  We drove down to Ft. Myers Beach for a day and brought home five pounds of local shrimp from Beach Seafood Market.  Wow!  That turned out to be the culinary highlight of their visit.  For some reason, there were no leftovers.

Del and Becky fit right in with the happy hour crowd from "C" dock, so evening happy hours were celebrated as usual.  The week went by incredibly quickly, and then they hopped into our minivan and drove it and the dingy trailer home on the 26th.

They arrived home safely on the 28th; and our car now resides safely in our garage, thanks to my daughter Kim, who arranged to have our driveway plowed of the seemingly never ending snow that Ohio in enduring.

On the night Del and Becky left, Sue and I were afflicted with severe flu like symptoms that incapacitated us for several days.  We finally were able to start prepping the boat on January 30th, which means we missed our window to head for the keys.  Even now on day five, we are not feeling 100 percent.  We hope to be ready to leave Legacy Harbour Marina on Wednesday if we feel strong enough and the weather cooperates.  You can follow our progress by clicking on the Spot GPS link in the blue box on this page.

January in Fort Myers

Working on the boat has taken up most of the last two weeks.  She now sports two coats of wax, with the exception of a third of the cockpit.  I also added red LED lights to the back of the electric panel, thus illuminating the breaker switch labels in red for night time sailing. 

On a more serious note, we had to ship our Track It TV device in for service.  Corrosion had caused a short in the remote control cable, sending the unit as far as it could go in one direction.  The unit spent several hours trying to move further than the allowable 720 degrees of rotation and broke a gear in the gear box.  The good new is that the unit is still under partial warranty, so we will only pay part of the repair.  The bad news is there was a snow storm in North Carolina, where the unit will be repaired.  The unit arrived in Asheville on Wednesday the 12th of January, but was not successfully delivered on Thursday or Friday.  Hopefully, it be delivered on Monday the 17th, a full week after I shipped it.  In the meantime, I rewired the power supply to its own switch, which I had to install near the electric panel.  It was sharing the stereo breaker, and the stereo was playing when the corrosion forced the unit to self destruct.  We are still watching tv with the dish temporarily mounted to a mop handle!  However, this will not work once we leave the dock and start anchoring.

We also purchased some lumber and made the frame to carry the mast on the Erie Canal next May.  It was easier to do this now when we have a car and easy access to borrowed power tools.  However, Lucy must share her cabin with six pieces of 2x6, which we will carry around all winter and spring.

We haven't just worked however.  On Friday the 7th of January we met old sailing friends Al and Barb Breninger for lunch at Dean's in Punta Gorda.  It was great catching up with them after not seeing them for two years.  We then went to Fisherman's Village to see the folk duo Patchouli perform on the outdoor stage.  The evening was cold and windy.  When Sue found out that they didn't have bulbs for their heat lamps, she volunteered "us" to go buy some.  As we walked away from the stage where they were setting up, Sue suggested that I drive to the Ace hardware while she checked out the shops at Fisherman's Village.  So that is how "we" supplied the heat lamps to keep Patchouli's fingers warm!

Julie and Bruce are excellent guitar players who sing and play only music that they have written themselves.  The cold weather kept the audience very small, and we visited with them during their breaks and purchased a few of their CD's.

On Friday the 14th we drove up to Venice to visit Vince and Jo Tate.  Sue taught with Vince at Maple Heights High, and they have always kept in touch.  We had a wonderful lunch at The Crow's Nest Resturant just inside the Venice Inlet, and then took a look at the Gulf of Mexico.

We had a very nice visit.  We learned that Vince, a physics teacher, has written a series of short books; but although Jo says they are wonderful, he is not interested in publishing them.

We left Venice in time to be back in Fort Myers for Friday Night Live at the Patio DeLeon.  Patchouli was performing, so we had the opportunity to see out favorite folk duo twice in the span of one week.

On Sunday the 16th Sue and I drove to Bonita Bills in Fort Myers Beach.  We met cruising friends Jerel and Tammy Roe from Kokomo, Indiana for lunch.  Jerel and Tammy were in the mooring field and dingied in to meet us.

After we explored the boaters flea market going on in the Bonita Bill parking lot, we enjoyed a pound of peal and eat shrimp for lunch.  Actually, Sue tossed a few of hers on my plate, so I ate a little more than a pound.  Anyway, we had a great time catching up with Jerel and Tammy, whom we hadn't seen since we left Marathon last March.  Jerel showed off his new AB dingy, and we were impressed by the dingy chaps, or cover, that he made himself. 

It was wonderful seeing them.  They are headed to the Bahamas soon, so we will really miss them in Marathon.  We had many exciting adventures with them last winter.

Becky and Del Gladrow will be flying in on Wednesday the 19th.  We are looking forward to visiting with them for a few days, and then they will be driving our mini van and dingy trailer home.  After that, we will finally be leaving for some cruising.

Welcome 2011

We had a very quiet Christmas Eve at Legacy Harbour Marina.  At sunset we walked past the Edison and Ford museums on McGregor Blvd to view the luminaries in the Edison Estates development.  In many areas of the development, homeowners put out paper bags weighted with sand and lit with candles.  It is much prettier than our photo shows.

We then enjoyed a nice dinner aboard and listened to music on my ipod.

Christmas day we went for our first sail of the winter.  There was a nice breeze on the river, so we beat down to the next bridge and then sailed back downwind.  Everything on the boat worked great!

My daughter Kim and son in law Jeff gave us a Spot GPS Messenger for Christmas.  It is a nifty little GPS device that sends signals through satellites to show our position or call for help, if necessary.  We put a link on this blog so that anyone can see where we are each evening as we travel.  Just click on the Spot GPS link on the right side of the blog.  You can zoom in and out, and switch to satellite or Hybrid mode to see a Google Earth photo of our actual location when the device is activated. 

Between Christmas and New Year's Eve we enjoyed another record cold front, with night time temperatures in the low 30s at the marina. We did drive down to Fort Myers Beach to have lunch at Bonita Bills.  We each enjoyed a pound of peel and eat shrimp for under ten dollars each.  This is up a bit from the eight bucks they charged last year.  It was a great lunch, though, and the waterfront atmosphere is excellent.

It warmed up nicely for the New Year's Eve celebration in downtown Ft. Myers, where we watched the ball drop at midnight just like people do at Times Square in New York City.  Well, maybe it is on a somewhat smaller scale.

Anyway, you can see the lighted ball in the background.  It was an interesting night for two sober people.  People watching was very entertaining.

Right now we are enjoying temperatures in the upper 70s.  We are still waxing Passage, but hope to be done this week.

Finally, we are very pleased to say that our longtime friends Del and Becky Gladrow contacted us after our last blog entry.  They are flying down to visit on January 19th, and they will drive our car and dingy trailer home for us on about the 24th.  It will be great fun visiting with them.  We both enjoy their sense of humor, especially Del's.  Their visit will spell the demise of many pink gulf shrimp, too!  We cannot express how grateful we are that they will be helping us out with our vehicle.

Big Announcement and Marina Life

We have decided to bring "Passage" home to Grand River, Ohio, in the the spring.  Therefore, we will be spending two months here at Legacy Harbour Marina before heading for the keys.  This will give us enough time to prepare and stock the boat for the long trip up the east coast.  Right now we are looking for a volunteer to drive our car and dingy trailer back to Painesville, Ohio, sometime before the end of May.  Any interested parties should contact us soon.

Cooper's Landing is part of Legacy Harbour Marina.  This is where "Passage" is docked with a variety of  vessels including five Gemini Catamarans:  two from Texas, one from Colorado, one from Sudbury, Ontario, and of course us. 

Sue and I have been frustrated in our efforts to finish waxing by the series of strong cold fronts and accompaning bad weather.

Usually a cloud line like the one above is followed by nasty winds and rain, plus the inevitable cold front.  One night as the thermometer approached 34 degrees outside, I awoke at 2:00 a.m. to discover that the reverse cycle heat had failed.  I found the coils well frosted, and an unidentified part had fallen from its mounting.  After placing the part in position and thawing the system, at 3:00 a.m. we fired the unit up.  Wanting to free up the reversing valve but not knowing what it was, I tapped on a few things and PRESTO!  We had heat!  Sometimes it's good to be lucky.

C dock is the happening place at the marina this year.  Seven boats have regularly met for Happy Hour at 5:00 p.m.  The addition of Wes and Sabine from the trawler "Wasafiri" should add two more regulars.  Wes and Sabine are prepping for a cruise to Panama.  Conversations have ranged from very informative to raucously hilarious. 

Run out of little cups for the White Russian Mousse shots at happy hour?  No problem.  Claudia demonstrates how to squeeze the frozen "shot" out of a plastic bag, which some found amusing and others yummy.

The marina sponsored a Christmas pot luck on the 16th that was very well attended. 

Before the festivities began,  John and Brenda on "Some Dream" presented Michael of "Dash" with a birthday present: a visor with some much needed hair on top.  Michael was excited; but not nearly as much as his bride Claudia, who found him even more attractive than usual.



Eric, the marina manager, welcomed us to the festivities and provided a ham and a cake.

Then we did what we do best.

Our last project was to replace the plastic Bosworth water tank selector valve.  We had replaced it with an identical one once before.  These valves have "o" rings which eventually let air into the water system.  Sudden strong splashes of water result.  

This time we replaced it with an Apollo bronze and stainless steel ball valve, to which I added two 90 degree elbows and half inch hose barbs.

Some modification of the mounting surface was required,  but the end result was a nicely installed valve which should last longer than the boat.

  

So goes our time in beautiful but chilly Ft. Myers, Florida.  Who know, some day soon we may even go sailing!  Sue and I would like to wish all of you loyal readers a Merry Christmas.

New Season In Florida

Our trip to Florida was much like last year except that we left Painesville on Sunday, November 14th, a week earlier than usual.  The 2.5 day car trip was uneventful.  Apparently Lucy has accepted her fate as a cruising cat, as each morning in the hotel she would eat breakfast and then go directly to her cat cage.  Past years she would hole up somewhere in the room, causing much frustration as we tried to pack and leave the room.  The drive down was easy, and we arrived at the Glades Boat Storage yard earlier than expected on Tuesday the 16th.  We found "Passage" in the work yard next to "Some Dream", crewed by our Sudbury, Ontario friends John and Brenda.  Note that you can expand the pictures twice by "clicking" on them.

We exhausted five containers of Softscrub with bleach in a day and a half, transforming "Passage" from green and black to bright white.  Sue then began prepping the interior so that on Friday we could move aboard, or as she likes to say, live in the treehouse.  Saturday was spent waxing and also scrubbing the fuel in the starboard tank.  The filter system that Jack designed and built with the help of David Blystone with imput from Sue worked great!

We lived aboard in the yard for four days while we worked on the drive leg and put two coats of wax on the hulls.  We just touched up the bottom paint with one quart of antifouling paint, but we added cayenne pepper to the paint.  We will see if that makes a difference.  A late shopping trip to LaBelle for food and supplies enabled us to be independent for a few days after launch.

We were scheduled to launch at nine, but the crew was late and our North Fort Myers friend Craig Wilson took a little while painting the pad marks of his boat "Kinsella" and installing a new cable on the centerboard.  So we launched at 9:45 and were motoring on the Okeechobee Waterway by 10:00 a.m on Tuesday, November 23rd.  We shared the waterway with "Kinsella", with Craig and his neighbor Tom Nelson aboard, who were transporting her to their dock behind their home in North Fort Myers.

Tom, on the left, and Craig make quite a delivery crew, don't they?  The Caloosahatchee River was deserted, as we saw only one other boat the entire day.  One never knows what one will see on the river, as witnessed by this photo Jack took last spring on our trip up to the Glades Storage Yard.

As usual, we stopped for the day at the Franklin Lock Campground. We could then sterilize and flush our water tanks before dark so that we would have usable water.  Wednesday we installed all of our running rigging.  On Thanksgiving Day we bent on the jib and mainsail, and "Passage" was a sailboat far earlier than any other year.

Sue then cooked a turkey breast, and we enjoyed a great Thanksgiving dinner complete with all the trimmings.  We really enjoyed our three days at the Frankllin Lock, despite the nocturnal screachings of a supposed "rare" Limpkin.  When I took his picture, a man from an RV asked if I had anything to shoot him with other than a camera!  Perhaps that explains why these obnoxious birds are so rare.

We completed our passage to Legacy Harbour Marina in a light rain of Friday the 26th.  Lucy expressed her disgust with the sound of the Westerbeke engine by assuming "the pose"

Apparently, burying her face in her blankets makes motoring barely tolerable.  Captain Jack, on the other hand, displayed a completely different attitude while at the helm!

John and Brenda from "Some Dream" had been at Legacy for quite a few days, and they drove us out the Glades so that we could pick up our car and dingy trailer.  Soon we found ourselves enjoying "happy hour" with John and Brenda and Tom and Doris Johnson, who are cruising a Mainship 350 out of Severna Park, Md.

We are settled in at the marina and have already been to two West Marine Stores.  Saturday Sue did a load of laundry.  Meanwhile, Jack rebuilt the head, which had decided to be stubbornly uncooperative, while he tried to watch Ohio State pummel Michigan.  All in all, Saturday was a great day at the marina; and we capped it off with dinner at the Joe's Crab Shack at the end of the dock with the same happy hour crew as yesterday.  Excellent!

Cruising North

On Saturday, March 20th, we finally left Marathon.  At the first sign of daylight, we released the mooring ball at 7:10 a.m. and headed out the west entrance to the harbor.

We motored several miles to reach the navigable span of the Seven Mile Bridge.

After we crossed under the bridge, we raised the main and unrolled the genoa and enjoyed a great sail up to the Little Shark River.  On the way up we saw several sea turtles.  Most quickly dove once they spotted the boat.  However, as we sailed by, one huge turtle floated within five feet of the boat and just looked at us.  We didn't have a camera ready because we didn't expect him to stay on the surface.

After a very pleasant night at the Little Shark River, we motorsailed downwind to Goodland, and then motored the ICW up to the Rookery Channel Anchorage, a 60 nautical mile day. 

We usually are alone in the anchorage, but not this year.  We shared the anchorage with two other catamarans and eventually a 29 foot Bayfield monohull from Canada.  We were invited aboard the Prout catamaran "Deja Vu" sailed by Texans Jeff and Jane Landry for happy hour.  We were joined by Rob and Tina from the Iraqois 30 Catamaran "Mahalo" and Mark from the Bayfield.

The next day those two catamarans left, but we were joined by two more Geminis including "Nancy T".  Then the PDQ "Mongoose Magic"  crewed by Dale and Antha Koonce sailed in from Legacy Harbour Marina. 

 Finally our Canadian friends John Spenser and Brenda Carter on "Some Dream" came in and rafted off of  "Mongoose Magic.

Since we had not seen our four friends since leaving Ft. Myers in January, happy hour aboard "Mongoose Magic" was great fun for all six of us as we caught up on our winter's activities.

During the two days we waited for a wind shift at Rookery Channel, we dingied over to the Keewaydin Island side of the ICW and walked one minute across the island to the beach.  We enjoyed walking on a beach that one can only get to by boat.  Sue and I collected a lot of nice shells.  At times we were the only people on miles of deserted beach.

On Wednesday the 24th the wind shifted to the east and we sailed towards Ft. Myers Beach.  Unfortunately, the wind died after a couple of hours; and we had to motor the rest of the way.  We picked up mooring ball 30 at 2:45 pm.  That evening we dingied over to Bonita Bills, where we ate peel and eat shrimp right off the boat.  The next evening we were entertained by Canadians Gordan and Margaret Hogan aboard their PDQ 36 "Hogie Cat". 

Saturday was a big day for cruisers in Ft. Myers Beach.  The city threw a party and provided free food and beverage for boaters on the mooring balls.

We had a great time visiting with newly met sailing friends and enjoying free food and beer.  We especially enjoyed the story of the grueling 28 days at sea endured by Tony and Mia who were on the mooring ball next to us.  Engine and rigging problems had made their passage a trial, and they were glad to be safely in the harbor.

After the party we dingied across the harbour to Doc Fords Restaurant to see author Randy Wayne White and purchase some of his books.

Of course, no visit to Ft. Myers Beach would be complete without seeing the beach, which was a little busy.

On Sunday, March 28th we dropped the mooring ball and motored out of the harbor.  We sailed up to and under the Sanibel causeway bridge.  We were able to sail just about all 15 miles up the Caloosahatchee River to Legacy Harbour Marina in downtown Ft. Myers.  We will spend this week getting the boat ready for storage before heading up the river another 40 miles to store the boat for the summer.