7/12/02 | Still dockside in St. Pete

St. Pete puts on a big show for Independence Day, and we joined the crowds on the waterfront park to eat festival food (expensive and bad for you, but tasty) and listen to loud festival music. The basin we'd anchored in when we first arrived, as well as the rough anchorage area outside the protected basins, were packed with boats of all sizes and descriptions. We went out on the Pier to watch the fireworks, which were terrific as expected, although since fireworks are legal to buy in Florida they had quite a bit of competition all over town.

We watched the fireworks with Hans and Ursula, acquaintances from Boulder who had taken a year off to go cruising before we left in 1999, whose new boat was coincidentally on the transient dock just a few "doors" down from us. They are also friends with Vern and Kathy on Andante III, who we'd last seen in Isla Mujeres, and Vern had told us that the other couple had recently bought a Manta 40 catamaran in New Jersey (they'd sold their previous boat after their year-long cruise) and delivered it down to somewhere in Florida. When we'd arrived, we'd noticed the Manta with a New Jersey homeport, so we asked the dockmaster -- sure enough, it was theirs!

Hans and Ursula were still in Colorado, but we found out by email that they were planning to come down for the weekend of the 4th to sail their new boat up to Pensacola to be hauled and stored. It was fun to see them and catch up with things, and interesting to talk about their transition from cruising back to real life. (It obviously didn't work too well, since they bought another boat!) Like us, Hans and Ursula would like to have some sort of arrangement where they could cruise part of the year, and work part of the year. It seemed to us that most of the cruisers we met in the Caribbean who had been out for more than just a few years were doing this kind of thing -- not necessarily working part of the year, but off the boat with family or in a "home base". We are beginning to believe that unless you are a total life-under-sail maniac, that's the way to go. Even Lin and Larry Pardey settle down for a while now and then.

Seeing Hans and Ursula again kicked off a very social week. We got together that weekend with another couple we'd first met in Boulder, Ken and Becky, who also have a Caliber 40 LRC and now live in the St. Pete area. Sandy, who lives here and whose brother, who reads this web site, told her we were in town, was nice enough to take us out to dinner (she sails too, so we had plenty to talk about). And we had a wonderful reunion with Larry and Merri, who we'd met and stayed with in Sedona AZ on their emailed invitation the last time we were back in the US, and who now live in Florida. They'll be keeping an eye on Windom while it's on the hard.

During the few gaps in our busy social calendar, we've been working through our to-do list. Sometimes it seems like we add new items just as frequently as we cross off finished items! One project which suddenly loomed in importance was air conditioning, as the cool weather that greeted us upon our arrival gave way to more usual summer conditions. We decided we weren't going to get much accomplished if the boat was too uncomfortable to live on during daylight hours, but we weren't too excited about spending $800 on a portable air conditioner designed to fit in a boat's hatch. So Britt biked down to the closest appliance store and arranged for delivery of an inexpensive house-type window air conditioner. A couple hours with the sewing machine and some spare Sunbrella produced a funnel-like sleeve; he placed the air conditioner on the deck just ahead of the overhead hatch in our main cabin, fit the sleeve around the open hatch, and bungeed it around the front of the air conditioner. The sleeve and the hatch lid direct the cool air nicely into the cabin. Not as slick-looking as a "portable marine a/c unit", but much cheaper.

We have to save money where we can, because we're back in the land of Boat US and West Marine, tempting us at every turn with all sorts of nifty boat things we really, really, need. We're putting off most boat projects until we recommission Windom for the next cruise, but a few things can't wait. For example, we bought a new solar vent (a teeny solar panel powers the exhaust fan) for the shower compartment, to replace the one that quit working over a year ago, since ventilation will be important during storage. We have decided to take two of our solar panels off the boat and mount them on the RV, so we need more hardware for that project.

Ah, the RV. It's really a step down, to go from the work of art that is a modern cruising sailboat, all fine teak and heavy-duty construction, to a fake woodgrain plywood and plastic shack-on-wheels. The RV is smaller and noisier, of lighter, lower quality materials; on the other hand, it cost less than a tenth the cost of the boat. It travels much faster, and even gets about the same fuel mileage while the engine's on.

But the thing that is going to take the most getting used to is the artwork. You see, the former owners of the RV are dog trainers, and one of their relatives is an artist, who decorated the exterior with airbrushed scenes of happy frolicking puppies. Puppies on the front. Puppies on the back. Five of them on the starboard side, posed and obedient-looking. It's a real doghouse-on-wheels. So far we've had three total strangers ask us if we are dog groomers. Aie.

The other day we drove down to the boatyard where we plan to haul Windom. It's off the Okeechobee Waterway, about a hundred miles southeast of here, so we shuttled the RV there with the help of some friends who live nearby. The boatyard is really out in the middle of nowhere -- we literally had to drive across a cow pasture to get there -- and about fifty miles inland, reachable only by canal. How strange, to see a forest of masts so far from the ocean. It's probably as hurricane-proof a place as we can get in the state of Florida.

There is one problem, which we didn't realize until after we'd already left the RV and returned "home" to the boat. We started pulling out the charts, figuring out our route to the boatyard; we'd either take the Intracoastal to Fort Myers or go offshore, depending on weather, and then turn up the Caloosahatchee river, the western end of the Okeechobee Waterway. I was looking at the Caloosahatchee chart for the first time, and noticed that between Fort Myers and the boatyard there are five fixed bridges with 55-foot clearance. Unfortunately, Windom's mast is 56.5 feet high. It never occurred to us that the bridges on the Okeechobee Waterway (other than a 49-foot bridge on the east side of the lake, which would prevent us from crossing the entire waterway but is not on our route to the boatyard) would be any different from the standard 65-footers on the Intracoastal Waterway. Oops.

Although bridge clearance is determined at mean high tide, we don't have a lot of tide to work with; lower low tide these days is around 3 a.m., according to our tide program, and in any event the total tidal range in the Fort Myers area is pretty slim. But at least the bridges are on the Caloosahatchee River, where there still is some tide, rather than upstream on the canal, past the locks, where there's no tide at all. In midafternoon we can probably count on having an extra six to twelve inches. That's not quite enough, so we'll have to do something radical: heel over.

The 49-foot bridge further east is well-known, and what's also well-known is the method that many boats with taller masts use to get under it. A marina near that bridge has a set of large barrels which are filled with water and used to lean too-tall boats enough so they can make it under. We're already a little tilted to port, so hopefully if we move all our weight over and hang the dinghy and motor off the side, we will heel enough (we'll need 10-15 degrees depending on the tide -- see, trigonometry can be useful!) to slide through. If it doesn't work, we'll have to hang out in Fort Myers while we find another place to haul.