still in: Key Largo, FL

But hopefully not for long. There's a chance a teensy weather window will open up on Wednesday, and we're antsy to get moving. We missed a window on Monday because we weren't quite ready - well, Britt and I were willing to drop a few unfinished projects and jump on it, but Jim and Marilyn still had a few things to do.

So this morning I did something extremely exciting: I turned Windom around. So what, I hear you say?  Well, Windom is 40 feet long, and the canal we're in is 42 feet wide. But the Andersons do it all the time, and yesterday we were aboard when Jim turned Summer Wind in preparation for heading out to test his new instruments (their boat was struck by lightning over the summer, and they've had to replace all the electronics). It looked pretty easy the way he did it, so rather than taking the chicken route and pulling Windom around using lines from shore, I decided I wanted to try jockeying the boat around myself.

Of course, we deliberately chose this morning because there was practically no wind. Any fool (i.e., me) can turn a boat in its length with no wind - I knew the theory, but I'd never done it on my own. Piece of cake! At the wheel, at the stern, I could see just how close we were getting to the edge of the canal as I slid slowly into position a few yards from the left edge of the canal, turned right, and then alternated forward and reverse, slowly kicking the stern around. (Boats are easier to turn to the right than to the left in close quarters because in reverse, there is a little bit of "prop wash" which makes backing to the left easier. But they're very different from turning a car, because the rudder is at the rear, so turning the wheel right only moves the bow to the right by moving the stern to the left.) And of course, if the stern's in the right place, the bow's in the right place. Well, more or less - Marilyn, on the foredeck, was apparently pointing that I had lots of room forward, but as I was looking behind me rather than at her I never noticed. Fortunately I looked up in time to see Britt (on the far shore) make a complicated hand signal that I correctly interpreted as, "You're about to take out some overhanging mangrove branches with our wind generator, so move forward!"

Britt's rechecked the rigging tension, our watermaker makes water (and doesn't leak), and our dinghy motor is good to go. (Ok, story about the dinghy motor. Remember I said that we'd figured out the fuel pump diaphragm was the problem?  While still in Marco Island, we called the Maryland store we'd originally gotten the motor from and ordered the part, so that we wouldn't have to wait long. Eight days later, sitting here in Key Largo, the part hadn't arrived, so I called again. "Oh, we've been meaning to call you! That part's backordered three weeks. How soon do you need it?"  Grr. Good thing we called. So, we canceled our order and called Travis Marine in Fort Myers, where we'd bought a few parts. They're part of a chain, so even though they didn't have the part we needed they were able to locate it at their Bossier, Louisiana store. We had it sent overnight - the shipping cost more than the darn part! But soon it was in our hot little hands, and soon after that it was installed in the outboard. And the parts guy at Travis called us to check that it had arrived! Now that's service. Needless to say, we're ordering from Travis from now on.) The wind instrument on the mast...mostly works. We'll see.

Another thing that mostly works is our email. The ham radio email system that I use, Winlink 2000, in order to get rid of spam has switched over to an "acceptance only" protocol - basically, if we don't send you email first, you can't send us email! This is not good for us, since we love it when people who read our website send us mail. I've been experimenting with ways of getting around this block, and I think I've come up with one, but during the process I think that some of our email has gone into the bit-bucket. So if you've sent us email recently (to any windom.netrack.net address) and not received a reply, please resend it in a day or two. You can also send to KG4EYP [the "at" sign] winlink.org, but before you do (the first time), you must go to http://winlink.org/accept and enter your email address.

Well, our fingers are crossed. If this window doesn't pan out, the next one may be a while in coming, and we've got itchy feet.

So I went diving the other day and I caught this REALLY BIG lobster...

Here we are at Blackwater Sound, Key Largo, tied up next to Summer Wind, Jim
and Marilyn Anderson's Caliber 40. Their boat is a few years older than
Windom and there are a few differences, but basically they're the same boat.
The house belongs to Jim's parents, who are being awfully nice about
having us impose on their space.

Currently in:  Blackwater Sound, Key Largo, FL

Here we are in the Florida Keys, so naturally we're anchoring in hidden bights, lounging on white sand beaches, snorkeling in clear water, and eating fresh-caught fish every night. Yeah, right - wanna buy a (65-foot-high) bridge?  We're tied up in a canal next to Jim and Marilyn Anderson's Caliber 40 Summer Wind, behind Jim's parents' house, doing final boat projects and frantically shopping for the last things we have discovered we need, and eating fresh-caught lasagne and grapefruit.

Shortly before we anchored at Long Key on Saturday night we heard a strange noise, like something heavy falling. Turned out one of our alternator belts had shredded itself, probably because two and a half years of storage had dried out the rubber; we replaced both alternator belts as well as the idler pulley belt. We also tested the watermaker while there, which leaked all over the place from cracked plastic fittings - we're buying new fittings tomorrow, as it turns out there's a Spectra dealer in Marathon. We're waiting for a new fuel pump for the outboard, as (as Britt finally figured out) a rubber diaphragm dried out and cracked, allowing gasoline to flow into the crankcase and contaminate the oil. We need to rebuild both our heads (toilets), as the rubber seals aren't sealing as well as they ought to, probably because...well, you get the picture. Boats, clearly, are "use it or lose it."

At the moment, Britt's with Jim up in Homestead trying to get new valves for our propane tanks - back in Colon, Panama the new-style valve (with an overflow prevention device) on one of our tanks got stuck, and we'd had to have it replaced with an old-style one since they didn't have new ones - now it's illegal to fill tanks with this style valve in the US and we were turned away at the propane station, so we have to spring for new valves. I've just finished removing the "BOULDER, CO" from the sides in preparation to replace it with "DURANGO, CO". It's sort of disheartening to never quite finish our to-do list, but the number of things that we absolutely must do before we leave is getting smaller. We've been sneaking looks at the guidebooks and starting to plan routes. Maybe we'll actually make it to the Bahamas this year...

Currently in:  Long Key Bight, FL

Yay, we're in the Keys! We left Marco Island just after dawn, along with several other boats that clearly had the same idea. It was trawler weather for most of the day, the Gulf green and glassy, but toward afternoon we got enough wind that we could sail the last couple of hours in to the Little Shark River. Too bad our dink motor is sick; the area is part of Everglades National Park, a maze of backcountry mangrove channels, and it would have been interesting to explore.

We were awakened at about 3:30 am when a squall came through with quite a bit of wind. Since the Little Shark River is a tidal river (i.e., the current reverses direction every tide change) we were lying to the current rather than to the wind - until the wind piped up from the opposite direction. The wind shoved us around this way and that, causing our chain to drag along the bottom and make a lot of ominous grinding noises. Hard to sleep when there's what sounds like a giant chewing on rocks under your bed! We let out a little more rode but there was basically nothing to do other than wait until the wind died down. (In retrospect we probably should have anchored closer to shore, and/or used two anchors in the Bahamian Moor, one upstream and one downstream.)

When we woke the second time this morning, several boats had already cleared out. We could see the other sailboats ahead of us putting up sails in the light southwest wind, so as soon as we were clear of the river mouth and turned south, we did the same. We were tight on the wind but with less than 10 knots and no waves at all it was a fine, smooth sail.

One of the boats ahead of us realized they couldn't clear Cape Sable with the conditions, and motorsailed on the direct course instead. Another, a pretty green cat ketch with tanbark sails on a wishbone rig (all the nonsailors reading this are saying, "Huh?") tacked, which inspired us to keep the motor off and do the same. One carefully-thought out tack (using our computer navigation to plot exactly what course we needed to make, and where we needed to turn so we could do it) had us humming along at five knots, and once we cleared our mark we turned downwind, and on the reach we made six easily. The cat ketch instead kept tight on the wind close to shore, and we quickly outdistanced it.

At about 2:30 in the afternoon, though, the wind dropped off, and our speed did likewise, and pretty soon we realized that to make our anchorage in daylight we needed to motor, so we did. But it's been really interesting sailing and judging the wind without a functioning wind instrument. (Britt went up the mast before we left Marco Island and came back with the anemometer head. He got the cups spinning again by cleaning out corrosion, but discovered the directional vane is bent and cracked close to breaking, probably due to smacking one too many of the 55-foot bridges...we will try to repair it this week, so for now it's on the shelf rather than on the mast.)

We have a Windex at the top of the mast, an arrow that points to the wind. (The sailboat joke is that it points in the direction you're going, i.e., always into the wind!) The thing is, what it senses is the apparent wind - the wind that's blowing, plus the wind created by the boat's motion. So we have to do a little mental vector math that ordinarily our instrument does for us. If we're motoring in a dead calm, it will point straight ahead. A little wind from over our right shoulder will deflect the pointer toward the right, but how much depends on the exact angle of the (true) wind, and its speed relative to ours. And of course we have no instruments at all to give us a hint at the windspeed (other than our bodies - but it's really hard to separate the feel of the apparent wind from the true), so we have fallen back on the Beaufort Scale, judging the wind by the texture of the surface of the water, the size of the riffles and the wavelets and the waves. When the surface is smooth and glassy, we turn on the motor. When little riffles form on top, depending on the wind angle, we might be able to sail.

NOAA is forecasting "light and variable" tomorrow. Well, we'll see what that looks like!

currently in:  Marco Island, FL

I should have known not to count my miles before they're hatched, as it were. If everything had gone according to plan we'd be in the Keys today - but as is usual when cruising, very little has gone according to plan!

Blame the weather, the deterioration of our equipment while in storage, and our own stupidity (aka the deterioration of our cruising brains while on land!). Our first problem was entirely our own fault - forgetting to check the tide level when we anchored in 7 feet. Come 10 pm, we were bumping the bottom; we let out a lot more anchor rode to get ourselves into deeper water, and set the alarm for 5:30 am so we could leave at high tide. We set out groggily the next morning and had a decent sail down to Marco Island, although the wind was more north than northeast (perhaps it was even northwest!) which made for a nearly downwind run on jib alone. Negotiating the sea of markers just inside the entrance was a bit tricky, but we made our way to a nice anchorage near an uninhabited little island, and - checking the tide - settled ourselves in.

The forecast for the next day didn't sound promising so we opted to stay for the day. After doing a few boat chores, we decided to take a dinghy ride and explore the area. This was the first time we'd run the outboard since recommissioning it, and at first it worked fine. Then...it didn't. Fortunately, we weren't too far from the boat, and although it died a few times on the way, we didn't have to break out the oars - good thing, because the wind and current were both against us!

So we spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what was wrong with the outboard, to no avail. We put everything away that night expecting to leave the next day, but I was still a little concerned about the forecast for continued strong winds, and when we woke and NOAA was still predicting 25 knots, we opted to stay put for another day. Britt decided that he needed some help on the outboard, so we (cautiously) dinghied in to the Marco River Marina, where a mechanic suggested we change the spark plugs. We returned to the boat - the motor sounding worse and worse - and changed the spark plugs: no improvement. After lunch, Britt dinked back in to the marina, while I stayed "home". A few hours later, the marina launch pulled up next to Windom, our dinghy in tow.

The mechanic had loaned Britt a can of carburetor-cleaning-gunk and advised him to remove and clean the carb, and if that didn't work, to come back the next morning with the motor and he'd fit it in to his schedule. Britt found a missing bolt, and a cracked bit of plastic, but even after he'd fixed these and used the cleaning stuff, the motor showed no improvement. So we moved Windom to an anchorage within rowing distance of the marina, and this morning, Britt returned to the marina, hoping the mechanic would be able to diagnose the problem - and show him how to fix it.

Not long after Britt left, he called me on the VHF. Turns out the mechanic didn't show up this morning, but called in...from the hospital. Nobody's quite sure what's going on. Britt's still there, in a corner of the shop, trying to fix our outboard. He rowed back a few hours ago, picked up some tools and some granola bars, and headed back to the marina. Well, whatever happens - Britt's going to learn a lot more about outboard motors!

We absolutely have to have a working outboard before going to the Bahamas. It's a big part of our enjoyment, being able to zoom out to remote snorkeling areas, being able to explore places far from our anchorage. So it's not a planned delay, but it's a necessary one, and this doesn't seem like a bad place to hang out for a while. But hopefully we'll be moving again - with a happy dinghy motor - soon.

Oh! Breaking news, just in from Britt over the radio. It seems to be the fuel pump, so we're ordering one and having it sent ahead to the Andersons in Key Largo (who have already received a half dozen packages we've had sent there!) I guess we'll be on the move again soon, although we've missed our weather window and will likely have to motor rather than sail the next few legs. It will be nice to get further south before the next cold front comes in this weekend.

currently in: the Gulf of Mexico

Yay, we've escaped Tarpit Harbor, aka the Fort Myers Yacht Basin. Not that we've gone very far; we've put only about 17 nautical miles under our keel and are anchored just outside Matanzas Pass and Fort Myers Beach. We're not actually in a real anchorage, but with the wind out of the north the water is placid close to shore, so we just motored up toward the beach and dropped the hook in 7 feet of water. And then we had drinks, to celebrate making it out of the Okeechobee and only scraping our VHF antenna on the bottom of two of the three 55-foot bridges.

The wind is blowing pretty well, although we're not exactly sure how hard it is as when we turned on the instruments this morning we noticed that the wind-o-meter wasn't reading (and the little cups on the actual instrument at the top of the mast weren't turning), and we have no idea how or when that happened - it worked on the way from Glades - but we weren't about to go up the mast to fix it right then. NOAA weather radio says 15-20 knots out of the northeast; our battery monitor, which has a setting to read our alternative energy, says the wind generator's doing 3 amps.

Tomorrow we should have good sailing to Marco Island, where we may hole up for a layover day if the wind, as NOAA predicts, increases to 20-25 knots. From there it's a long day, farther from the coast and therefore rougher if it's blowing hard, to the Little Shark River in the Everglades. It's one more day to Channel Five between Matecumbe Key and Long Key, where we'll wait for favorable conditions to head east up the keys toward Key Largo, where we'll visit with the Andersons on Summer Wind, pick up our mail, and get our last supplies.

currently still in: Fort Myers, damn it.

Yesterday I was going to write a gleeful post about how we'd wrapped up all our work and were ready to go, but decided that I'd better not as I might jinx things. I guess just thinking about it was enough to activate the jinx!

We finished all our Really Important Boat Stuff on Wednesday, including getting the RV stored, since nobody wanted to buy it - until we were just about to drive to the RV storage place!  And by that time we were committed to keeping it and had already gathered up all the things that we wouldn't need on Windom but wanted to bring back to Colorado.

We'd been sort of planning to leave on Thursday, but Britt commented that we hadn't had a chance to see the Edison-Ford Winter Estates which are just down the road from the marina, and the weather was supposed to be sort of yucky on Friday as a cold front was blowing in, so we took Thursday morning and played tourist at the winter homes of Edison and Ford (and as it turned out they were offering free admission that one day, to celebrate something or the other) and then did a few minor boat projects in the afternoon (some of which turned out to be less than minor, so we didn't actually finish until nearly 8 pm...)

So, we figured we might leave on Friday. But listening to NOAA weather radio wasn't encouraging:  the 90% chance of rain forecast wasn't appealing, nor was the possibility of 20-25 knots, nor was the possibility of tornadoes. It was howling and pouring when we got up in the morning, and neither of us were too excited about the prospect of leaving...so we didn't. In fact we didn't leave the boat all day; I read, and wrote, and baked brownies, and Britt figured out how to make the new digital camera take movies, and ate brownies.

But right now the sky is clearing and the wind is more consistently out of the north, indicating that the front has passed. This is the weather we want for going to Key Largo. Northeast winds, as are forecast for the next several days, will put the wind just aft of the beam, our favorite point of sail. Even though relatively strong winds are forecast, they'll be coming over land and we'll be close to shore, so the waves won't be big. And for our first task, getting out of the river, the north winds will aid us as they "blow the water out" and make the tides lower, which should help us squeeze under the remaining bridges.

I don't want to jinx us again, though. So I'll just say that I hope our next update is from somewhere else. But if it's howling and pouring again, we'll just sit tight.

currently in:  Fort Myers, FL

Yikes. Tomorrow it will have been one month since we arrived at the boatyard and laid eyes on Windom for the first time in over two years, and we're still not out cruising yet. If it takes this long every time, part-time cruising becomes a lot less appealing!

On the other hand, a lot of the work we've been doing has been to fix things that happened because the boat was badly stored in Florida, and we don't intend to do that again. (For example: the batteries were completely dead because we couldn't leave a solar panel up to trickle charge them, which would add dangerous windage in a hurricane, and repeated bilge pump operation from the large amount of rain that fell drained the batteries.) We made so many mistakes storing Windom that we could write a book on How Not To Store Your Boat. All the things that were applicable in Maryland for winter storage were wrong for Florida summers; much of the advice we received from other cruisers was wrong, or more exactly it was incomplete. And a lot of things we didn't do because we were lazy and it was midsummer, and we paid for them all this past month.

But we sure did accomplish a lot. We record all the maintenance work in our maintenance log, and here's what's been done since December 6th:

• Cleaned exterior and interior of mildew, mold, major corrosion, tape and tape residue
• Repaired gouges on keel where we'd hit a reef in the Bay Islands of Honduras, sanded the bottom (a nasty task!), taped a new, higher waterline, and applied two coats of bottom paint
• Disassembled and lubricated the anchor windlass, cleaned corrosion off the motor and painted it with rust-inhibiting paint
• Cut out rusty sections of anchor chain and spliced new anchor rodes out of what was left of the good chain plus some spare anchor line, and measured and marked all three anchor rodes (primary, secondary, and stern) every 25'
• Greased the prop and installed new zinc anodes on shaft and prop
• Filtered the old diesel fuel through our offline fuel filter - we filtered it quite a bit before launching, and then filtered more while sitting in the marina. The ick that has grown in the tanks (despite the chemicals we added) is truly amazing!
• Retensioned the standing rigging (the stuff holding the mast up), removed and laundered all the running rigging (the lines controlling the sails), and turned all halyards end-for-end, which required splicing new eyes into the ends
• Inspected and cleaned the mainsail, and installed the jib on the roller furling
• Disassembled the plumbing Y-valves and lubricated them, lubricated the various moving parts of the toilets and got them mostly working (one is not usable right now, the other is)
• Cleaned out the bilge, replaced the bilge pump float switch, and cleaned out the water tanks
• Installed a new anchor pump washdown system
• Got the systems running again:  refrigerator, heater, VHF radios (installed a new handheld charger), SSB radio, stove and oven (which needed minor repairs and some major cleaning, as mud-daubers had made nests behind it), grill (which needed lots of cleaning and major repairs), instruments, lights (needed to clean off corrosion from contacts for the nav lights, and ended up replacing large sections of the wires that had been corroded, as well as the entire anchor light system), and so on
• Replaced batteries. Actually we did this twice, first getting some (relatively) inexpensive temporary batteries to get us out of the yard and down to the marina; then we bought and installed the big, heavy, expensive batteries we plan to actually use. And which hopefully will last through the next storage.
• Re-installed the solar panels, including a new one, and the wind generator and a new regulator.
• Installed new bimini and dodger
• Stripped old finish from all exterior teak, scrubbed with teak cleaner, sanded and oiled
• Cleaned and inflated dinghy, filled transom holes with epoxy (we'd cut them to bolt the engine on), bought a new between-decks plug and drilled out the transom to fit it. Still some repair and maintenance work left to do on the dinghy, though!
• Got the outboard motor going:  cleaned out all the mud-dauber nests inside the motor casing (!), changed the oil and filter and the lower unit oil, checked the spark plugs, pumped grease into the lube points, and so on

Of course each of these list items hides a lot behind a few words; the teak took four days of hard work from both of us, for example, and the anchor washdown pump required a lot of wiring and plumbing, all executed by Britt curled uncomfortably upside-down in the anchor locker (which we had to empty out and clean, first), with me handing him tools and parts. The big batteries we use weigh 165 pounds each, so in order to get them on or off the boat we need to winch them in using a halyard running from the top of the mast, over the end of the boom (which we extend by strapping the whisker pole to it), and just setting this up takes some time. Even relatively straightforward-sounding tasks take on new dimensions when done in the cramped spaces of a boat.

And the list doesn't include a few minor repairs and fixes and changes, not to mention all the minutiae of living, such as grocery shopping (and the big provisioning run), buying parts, doing laundry, doing bills...all of which are rendered a lot more difficult in an unfamiliar city, with an oversized vehicle (which nobody's bought yet - we had a few phone calls and one looker, but that's it). Our shopping expeditions, whether for food or for hardware, are planned like military maneuvers. (Usually the opposing armies of traffic and fatigue beat us.)

There's still a lot to do - but the list of what's left is a lot smaller. Hopefully we'll be out of here early next week. And finally we'll be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors!

currently in:  beautiful downtown Fort Myers. Still.

The reason I haven't been writing much isn't because we're not doing much - I'm sure you're all dying to hear about the exciting details of our line-laundering expedition, our teak restoration, and the installation of a new anchor washdown pump - but because by the end of the day we are both too beat to do anything other than fall into bed. This becomes a pattern. of course - we end up asleep by 9:30 and therefore wake well before dawn, so naturally we might as well get up and start working, and then we can cram way more work into the day, so by the time we eat dinner we're dead tired. Lather, rinse, repeat. The one exception was New Year's Eve when we walked the few blocks to downtown, which was closed off for a big street party. We ate dinner in a restaurant, watched all the silly people walking around with flashing light jewelry, listened to the three bands (one on each end of the big T of closed-off streets) for about two songs each, and then went back to the boat at a daringly-late ten p.m. Aren't we the late-night partiers!

We did our big provisioning run on Sunday evening, which meant that Sunday night was another late one, as packing the food we bought took as long as buying it - and we still had things to pack the next morning! Shopping for several months is a weird experience, as your brain tells you you can't possibly use four big cannisters of rolled oats, or five boxes of Wheat Thins. But rolled oats and Wheat Thins are two of our staples that are woefully pricy in the Bahamas, so into the cart they went - along with four pounds of raisins, three bottles of real maple syrup (and two of fake), three bottles of barbecue sauce, fourteen cans of Ranch Style Baked Beans, ten pounds of whole-wheat flour...

It took us two dock-carts (here they have these big Rubbermaid wheel-barrow thingies) to get it all here and to our cockpit. Then we had to stow it. Fortunately, Britt is an expert at packing stuff. He used to pack horses for trips to the wilderness; he's not bad at stowing provisions in boats, either. We still had our old stowage spreadsheet (yes, we are geeks!) with the general strategy of what sort of food (cooking ingredients, drinks, packaged snacks, cans of baked beans, etc) go where; he handled the tactics. He built little forts out of canned juice and buttressed them with a box holding different kinds of rice mixes, and defused the potential catastrophe of too many glass bottles by mixing plastics among them. Meanwhile, I sorted the purchases and repackaged things that come in too much or the wrong sort of packaging. With all the cushions stacked in the corners so we could access the storage areas, and all the food scattered around the boat, it looked as though we had been hit by Hurricane Grocery. But finally we have things all packed away where they belong (for the most part!) and the boat shows no sign of all the goodies hidden away in storage.

Well, almost. You might remember I mentioned that our boat has a slight list to port, due to most of our heavier equipment being installed on that side. (Which we did because it's easier to run electrical cables on that side.)  Our stowage plan cleverly places the heavy stuff to starboard. So I think we're finally almost level!

Now, where am I going to *put* all this stuff?!