Manatee Pocket, FL

0 nm

Well, I've finally gone back and posted all of my old blog entries. It took me more than a couple of days to go back and read through my handwritten journal, find them all, type them up, and post them. So, if anyone cares, you can go back and read our exploits from before the disaster, at the end of January. I found one particularly dismal entry on which I commented on the state of our poor, cracked dinghy. If only we had known! Why didn't we do something then? But here we are, three months later. Three months! It's ridiculous.

I also posted from the end of March, when we left Daytona Beach, those first few glorious days of being back on the boat and moving. Lately those days have seemed distant again. I don't know if it was the loss of the computer or what, but our rhythm seems to be off. We're to entranced by stability, town, shops, all that stuff we're supposed to be escaping. We were supposed to have left here last Thursday, when we had the computer all set up, but one thing led to another, and here we are, almost a week later.

We did get a lot of stuff done in that week. For one thing, we scoured the boat top to bottom yesterday, something she sorely needed. Last week Karl reorganized all of our canned goods and discovered where we had holes in our inventory and where we need to stock up. We also put away all our winter clothes (hopefully for good, at least for a couple of years), and pulled out our tank tops and shorts from where they were buried under the vee-berth.

So we're fitting ourselves out for our vast international voyage. The Bahamas are only forty miles away from where I sit right now, but it's a huge forty miles. There's the Gulf Stream lurking out there, not to mention shoals and potentially corrupt customs officials and the much-talked-about trade winds. Lately, Karl's been leaning towards going the other way, hopping off from Key West to the Dry Tortugas, and thence--Mexico!! It's only 400 miles away, which would be a five-day passage, our longest ever. Dare we? I don't know.

We flipped a credit card on it the other night (for lack of a coin) and the card read Mexico. I'm still not sure we're brave enough. Even Karl, who was really pulling for the long passage, has seemed to be reneging. He's at least talking about buying Bahamian charts, so we'll see. Our plan really, as of today, is to make it down to Miami, where our crazy Canadian friends are waiting to cross to the Bahamas. We'll decide from there.

I can't wait to be off again, though. Computer in hand, charts at the ready, boat spick and span--we're ready to go places.