In search of our next adventure!
Que Dorado!
The biggest fish I have ever caught. No scale on board, but this Bull Dorado was 56 inches long and was caught in the Mona Passage on my trusty caveman handline. Lisa wrote about it in a log entry a few weeks ago but we were unable to post the photo.
Hey everybody! Sorry if you noticed that the website has been down for the last few days. The problem has been resolved and we are online again. We still have not been able to locate a copy of our Publisher files with our website draft so no update yet there although we hope one is coming. We may have to build again from scratch.
Speaking of “from scratch”, re-entry has been overwhelming. We had to put a new battery into the car after two years of sitting around and then take it to the muffler shop to repair the exhast fitting that that rusted away while we were gone. Gas is almost $3.00/gallon and everything seems to be a long drive away (ouch). No motoconcho or other convenient public transport to get us where we want to be.
We did go to a spectacular pot-luck last weekend with Chris and Susan aboard LaLeLu their Caliber 38. They promised us (shanghei) that we would have no crew responsibilities for the weekend and for the most part they kept their word and the the grog flowing. The pot-luck was sponsored by the ECSA (East Coast Sailing Association) and, if you are currently cruising in the islands, I’ll spare you from the sumptuous details. Let’s just say that the variety is more accessible in these parts where everyone has a car and a supermarket on every corner.
We have been moving some things off the boat into temporary storage so we have room to take care of some maintenance items. Yesterday we pulled off the mast boot and removed the creaky mast wedges from the through-deck collar and replaced them with a product called “Spar-tite”. It is a two part goop that you pour into the space between the mast and collar. It hardens into a solid rubber donut or permanent o-ring. We hope it eliminates that annoying creak and pop we would get from the teak wedges. We covered the whole thing up with a fresh new mast boot to the keep the sun from oxidizing the new seal.
Gotta go for now…
We're back in the U.S.! We arrived safe and sound last night and are now at Harbortown Marina in Canaveral, FL.
Will provide more detail in the next posting.
At 1:00pm…
Current Position:
27 49.44 N
80 09.36 W
Heading: 330 degrees
Speed: ~ 4.5 knots
Last night was pretty uneventful, except for ripping our spinnaker when taking it down around 7pm. It’s a small tear but it will need to be fixed before using it again. The winds went completely away in the night so we didn’t make as good of time as we had hoped. We did get a nice 2-3 knot boost from the gulf stream in the night and this morning so that helped nicely.
We are about 45 miles from Canaveral and at our current speed we won’t make it there before dark tonight (probably be there around midnight). So we’ll either find a suitable spot to anchor just inside the inlet tonight or if such a place doesn’t exist we’ll bob around until daylight and then enter. Wow – we’re almost there!!!