We've found ourselves -- with Windom, of course -- in some pretty strange places over the past three years. We've tied up behind a brewpub in Bangor, Maine; anchored on the Great Bahama Bank with no land in sight; and tucked up in a tributary of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. But we've never been up on stilts in a cow pasture before.
Our first sight of Glades Boat Storage was kind of surreal. When we drove down so we could leave the RV here, we could hardly believe there was a boatyard in the area. All we saw were citrus groves and farmland. Our directions had us turning by a campground, driving by a golf course, and then through a gate into a cow pasture. We saw cows. We saw more cows. Finally, we turned a corner and caught sight of a forest of masts (behind still more cows). Fortunately, the cows are kept out of the "boat pasture"! The yard employees, slow and indifferent Florida crackers whose drawls remind us that Florida is, after all, in the South, appear more natural with the cows than with the boats.
Despite its unlikely location, Glades is a popular place; being 60 miles from the ocean is a plus when it comes to hurricane risk. Two hundred boats are in storage here, along with twenty or so in the "work yard" (basically, a big gravel parking lot) where Windom now sits on jackstands. A space in the work yard costs $12/day, about three times what our cost will be in the storage yard, but there is power (flaky 15-amp household-type outlets) and water (sulfurously stinky and undrinkable, for cleaning purposes only). On our left is a South African couple who are fixing up their boat for sale, on our right is a local guy with a welder's nightmare of a steel project boat, but most of the other boats in the work yard don't appear to be being worked on at all. This is unsurprising, as boat work on the hard in central Florida in midsummer probably qualifies as one of the circles of Hell.
It's bad enough to be on the hard in the best of times. No fridge, no toilet, and a ladder to climb what seems like fifty times a day. But the ordeal is multiplied hundredfold by the thick, hazy heat that rises from the steamy ground to envelop us each day. We have gotten in the habit of waking early, because early morning is the best time to get work done. That's when we do outside projects, like washing the hull and greasing the prop. By ten a.m. we retreat to do chores inside our air-conditioned boat. But the heat overwhelms our modest air-conditioning after about one in the afternoon, so we move quite a bit slower and take a lot of breaks, and find excuses to do things directly under the single stream of cold air. By six p.m., or earlier if we've had a good afternoon rain, we can go back outside and work until sunset.
And oh boy, has there been a lot of work to do. Some of it is cleaning; we need to get every bit of food out because of critters (they have flying cockroaches here in Florida!), and wipe down all the surfaces with bleach to retard mildew growth. We had to clean off the "mustache" that we'd gotten on the hull from driving through the mangrove tea of the waterway. (The Okeechobee Waterway can be called "freshwater" only to distinguish it from saltwater. You wouldn't want to drink it, or even bathe in it, although we did see a few swimmers.) Some tasks are obvious decommissioning must-dos, such as shutting down the refrigerator, putting fuel preservative in our remaining diesel, and taking down the headsail. Some is just sorting out what we will take and what we will leave.
And then there is the weird stuff, the little things that we wake up in the middle of the night thinking of, forcing us to get up and write them down on The List so we remember. Like lashing a piece of screen material to the end of the boom, to keep birds from nesting in the hollow space there. Like covering the teak trim with outrageously expensive tape ("easily removable within two years" costs nearly $40 for a roll) to protect it from the relentless sun. Like disconnecting the "memory wire" from our stereo, which constantly pulls just a little juice from the battery to keep our selected radio stations in memory.
We
waxed the hull and the entire deck, even the nonskid, hoping that a
thick coat of wax will help protect the fiberglass. The stainless
steel is all cleaned and waxed too, although we're far enough inland
from the salt water that it shouldn't corrode. Britt sewed hatch
covers to protect the hatches. There's a sacrificial cloth around the
bit of mainsail that pokes out of the mast and a plastic wrap around
the teak anchor platform. The jib, wind generator, and one solar
panel are inside; the other two solar panels we have fastened on top
of the RV, and we'll hook them up soon.
But after a week of serious sweat, we are finally finished. This afternoon we brought the last load of "stuff" to the RV; tomorrow, the TraveLift will scoop up Windom for the short trip from the work yard to the storage yard. By then we will be out of here, by vehicle instead of by boat for a change. It will sure be different going at 60 miles an hour instead of 6.
So I guess this marks the end of at least this phase of our cruising adventure. What a long, strange trip it's been. Thank you for coming with us; look us up again in a year or two. We'll be back someday.