Category Archives: sailboats

August 22, 2020 · 12:25 pm

Making Life Better

When I dropped anchor here at Anna Maria Island, FL three years ago I needed a cooler to keep my fresh foods from spoiling. At the time I depended on a small generator (I eventually burned through THREE of them. They AREN’T designed for heavy duty use), so I sprung for a Yeti Tundra 45 cooler. Let me say, after three years, Yeti products are WAY overrated. I could have bought another brand at half the price that receives ratings as good as the Yeti. And the size of the Tundra 45 meant the only place I could put it on my 22-foot sailboat was in the cockpit where it takes up about half of the sole and sits higher than the bench seats. An awkward pain in the ass.

For the past three years I have been buying ten pound bags of ice, on average, every other day. Sometimes, in the heat of August and September I’ve been buying a bag a day. The Yeti will hold 20 lbs of ice and leave a little room left over for food storage. Not the best situation, but one deals with what one has. In the last year, after moving down from the large anchorage by the Bridge Street Pier to the Coquina North Boat Ramp, I have been buying ice at the kiosk at the trailer parking area. It’s the best deal on the island. . .a 10 lb. bag for a buck fifty as opposed to the Circle K two 10 lb. bags for $5. And the kiosk ice is cleaner, purer! Nevertheless, I’ve been spending $40-$45 a month to keep stuff from rotting. But there have been times where the ice has been very low. I’d look at the value of the stuff I need to keep chilled and weigh it against the hassle of rowing to shore, sometimes in trying conditions, and spending the buck and a half and just blow it off.

Readers who follow me know that in the past couple of years I have switched from using a generator to completely solar. Three hundred and ten watts of paneling, in fact. They have done a great job in keeping the batteries for my notebook, iPad, and phone with its wifi hotspot going strong, even on cloudy days. While the huge orange wart in the Oval Office believes that when the sun goes down you can’t watch television if you use solar power, even on the cloudiest of days the panels collect energy and direct it to your battery bank. MUCH slower than on sunny days, but they still collect and store energy.

After doing a lot of online research about 12volt-capable refrigerators I decided that the Ansten 30 liter fridge/freezer would be what I needed. It was compact and would fit inside my boat. The description said it will hold 42 12-ounce cans of soda. Not knowing how much volume that is, I went to the Publix Supermarket and bought my usual weekly supply of perishables. I then went to the canned soda isle and visually checked the volume of the cans with what I had in the shopping cart and the 30 litre fridge would be more than adequate. 

Think about your refrigerator. How much of the total volume of the fridge is simply unused? You have shelves with jars and Tupperware containers and everything above their tops is just empty space. You also store a lot of stuff in there you don’t need to. Things that are heavy on vinegar such as mustard, ketchup, salad dressings really don’t need to be refrigerated despite what it says on the label. Since it’s just ME and not stocking food for a family of five, this little unit fills the bill.

Last week my good friend, Stephen, sprang for the fridge and yesterday I picked it up at my maildrop and wrestled it to its new home. After waiting seven hours to let all the juices settle after the unit had been turned every which way for who knows how long, I turned it on. The digital display (in Centigrade) said that the internal temperature was 86F (30C). In less than half an hour the temperature had dropped to 33.8F (1C)! I’m impressed. And it’s QUIET, too. Certainly won’t disturb my sleep. I was running it through the 110volt inverter because I need to rewire the cigarette lighter outlet before I can use it. The unit cycled a couple of times before the inverter alarm for low voltage went off and I shut it down.

There will definitely be times when there will be problems with this setup. It has been raining off and on all day and night since last Tuesday, and it’s been a challenge to keep the battery bank topped off. There’s been enough for the light stuff as cited above, but the draw from the fridge is a challenge.

While it looks as though Tropical Storm, potential Hurricane, Laura is going to miss us here we’re still going to have a lot of clouds and rain.

Now, as we approach noon it’s heavily overcast and will likely stay that way for the rest of the day and for the next few days to come. Life’s not perfect but there are more sunny days than gloomy ones so I’ll do fine.

 

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Filed under Living off the grid, Living on the hook, Living Small, Minimalist Cruising, Retirement Afloat, sailboats, Small boat kitchen, Small Sailboats, Uncategorized

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June 6, 2020 · 3:02 pm

Hunkering Down

Second break in the bad weather. It started raining sometime in the middle of the night and kept on, steadily, until late morning. Stopped briefly and I was able to get about 2/3 of the water bailed out of the dinghy before it started pouring again.

What’s happening is that as Tropical Storm Cristobal swirls counter clockwise out in the Gulf of Mexico it’s sweeping its feeder bands across our area here where I’m anchored at the lower end of Anna Maria Island, Florida.

During this second break I was able to get inside the dinghy and bail it dry. It’s going to keep on raining according to the forecast and tonight The prediction is for winds gusting into the 25 mph range later on and 1 to 2 inches of rain is possible. The dinghy wouldn’t be able to take that much if it wasn’t bailed out. Could easily sink. Might, anyway. The canoe on the nearby power boat is down because it filled up with rain water. Haven’t seen those people in close to 2 weeks. They’re new to living on a boat and, perhaps, they just decided to cut their losses and walk away. They only paid $2,500 for the boat.

Starting to rain again. I might have to do a bit of bailing before I hit the sack tonight.

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April 2, 2020 · 10:12 am

Little difference because of lockdown…

It’s a nice day anchored here at the south end of Anna Maria Island, FL., and the coronavirus is far away. It’s a bit chilly for my taste at 62F at nearly 9:30 a.m. but the sun’s shinning, pelicans skim inches off the surface of the sparkling water and occasionally dive for some fish. I hear the resident osprey’s twitter gliding in the breeze from it’s lookout perch atop a nearby sailboat mast. An anhinga pops up close by with a small hapless fish it snatched out of the school…”Hey, anybody seen Harry lately?” A dolphin’s exhale puff tumbles into my cabin. No motor noises. The boat ramp, 125 yards away, is closed. Nearly everything ashore is shut down on governmental orders but I have well-stocked lockers filled with food for a while and I wouldn’t be doing anything ashore, anyway. Just sitting around playing on my computer and trying to learn the cord melody version of Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train” on my ukulele.

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November 1, 2019 · 9:09 am

Further Adventures In DIY Boat Maintenance

Exactly a month ago I wrote about removing the old, frozen outboard motor bracket from the boat…  https://onemoregoodadventure.com/2019/10/01/the-cruising-life/. As of yesterday the new bracket is now sitting jauntily on the transom. It wasn’t easy!

You have to know a bit about me to understand how difficult the job was. I’m 77 years old. I operate on lungs with a bit less than 40% of capacity due to COPD. I have three arterial stents and my fingers are gnarled from arthritis. I live full time on a Venture22 sailboat anchored off of Coquina Beach, Anna Maria Island, Florida, a bit south of Tampa Bay. Most of my adult life I made my living on the water either operating boats or repairing the damned things.

I tried to install it a week or so earlier but couldn’t do it. I I thought if I could get one or two of the 5/16″ bolts through the holes it might hold up well enough until I could climb down under the port seat in the cockpit to get the nuts on. And I’m trying to do this in a dinghy! The damned thing is heavy at 20 lbs and wakes coming in from the nearby Intracoastal Waterway had me bouncing up and down. Kersploosh! One of the bolts drops off into Davy Jones’s locker. Certainly a pain, but from years in the business, even though there are only four holes to be filled I bought FIVE bolts.

This wasn’t going to work so I gave up for the time being. I made a couple of calls to guys I know who are anchored up above but got no reply. So I’m thinking over the next couple of days, “What would I do if I was off on some deserted island by myself? How would I be able to cope and get the job done?

I pondered for a couple of days and then it hit me. I’d been going at it from the wrong direction! If I had a bolt sticking OUT of the transom it should be easier to get one of the holes to slip over IT than to try and get a bolt to slip into what is a small, moving hole. In my container of assorted odds and ends I found a 3” long bolt and nut and a couple of fender washers. The strange thing I notice as I’m digging through the stuff is that I’ve got a good assortment of bolts but, oddly, very few nuts to fit anything.

So, I have to climb down under the portside cockpit seat and it’s not easy. For the benefit of those who didn’t read the previous post this is the challenge…

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Best case scenario is that I’ll only have to do this three times. Did I tell you I still believe in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny?

I toss the bolt back to the transom and dive into the hole head first and inchworm my way aft. Though it’s a bare 7 feet, a half century of inhaling the smoke of licit and illicit substances has taken its toll and I have to pause a couple of minutes until my breath returns to normal. Or a reasonable facsimile of normal, anyway. Struggle my way out of the hole, into the cabin and up into the cockpit where I have to rest up for a few minutes.

I then wrestled the 20 pound  bracket down into the dinghy and, hand over hand, pulled my way to the stern. I tied the bow and stern of the dinghy off to keep from moving around as much as possible and then tied a length of paracord to the bracket and secured it to the stern railing so that if I lost my grip on the thing it wouldn’t fall into the water.

I lift the bracket up to set it on the protruding bolt and it nearly slides back into the hole. I forgot to secure it with duct tape as I’d planned.

Unfasten the bracket. Back around to the side of the boat and up into the cockpit. Down into the cabin where I rest for a couple of minutes before plunging into the hole again. A couple of pieces of tape over the head of the bolt only take a couple of seconds. That done, it’s inch my way topside again and tie up astern once more. Resecure the bracket to the stern railing and lift the bracket up onto the bolt. Holding it in place with one hand I slide a fender washer over the bolt and finger tighten the nut to hold the bracket steady while I put the bolts into the upper and lower outboard holes of the bracket. The holes aren’t exactly lined up but a couple of light taps with the small hammer I’ve brought along takes care of that, and the bolts are head-deep in the holes.

The problem comes with the inboard bottom hole. The way the thing is built the bolt (yellow arrow) protrudes too far to allow the head of the bolt to pass by and enter the pre-drilled hole (red arrow).

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Back into the boat cabin and dig out the cordless drill and a bit that will fit through the hole. I’ll drill all the way through the transom from the outside in the hole just above the intended one. It will be a pilot hole. Then, when I’m inside the hole again, with the proper sized bit, because that one won’t fit through the bracket hole, I’ll enlarge the hole until the bit bottoms out on the metal of the bracket.

Now I’m back in the hole for the THIRD TIME. Tighten the two lock tight bolts after fitting aluminum backing plates over the bolts and enlarge the new hole. I remove the tape from the pilot bolt and use some two-part epoxy stick putty to fill the hole that’s useless.

Outside and tied up to the transom again I remove the pilot bolt and put the new bolts into the holes. Back around to the side of the boat. Up into the cockpit. Down into the cabin. Squeeze into the hole. Inchworm my way to the transom and tighten the two final bolts.

DONE!! It looks cool back there. Today I just gave the go ahead to Cannon Marine down in nearby Longboat Key to order me a Yamaha 6 horsepower, long shaft, four stroke outboard. The price is nearly $300 less than a similar model Mercury outboard from West Marine or Bradenton Beach Marine. Monday I’ll know when it will be delivered. It has to be ordered from Yamaha as it’s not in stock but will be coming in with some other, larger engines they’re going to be ordering. When I get it I plan on doing a bit of cruising around the area. Up into the Manatee that goes through Bradenton and into Sarasota and the Hillsborough River that flows through downtown Tampa. I want to go up there and check out the Jean Street Boat Yard. It’s the only one close by (40 miles away) that will let you work on your boat yourself. I need to paint the bottom to fend off the barnacles and other flora and fauna that grow on it in these warm, shallow waters. An interesting side bar to the Jean Street yard is that it’s the oldest boat yard in the entire state of Florida, opening its doors for business in 1848!!!

 

 

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October 1, 2019 · 9:45 am

The Cruising Life

Some wag once said, “The cruising life is repairing your boat with inadequate tools in exotic locations.” The fact that I have only “cruised” about a third of a mile in the last six months does NOT negate that statement.

I’ve been struggling to remove the original outboard motor bracket on the port side of the transom. The boat had a 25hp Yamaha when I bought it. Much too big and heavy for such a small, light boat as a Venture 22.  It as a lousy engine, too boot. Broke down THREE TIMES between Ft. Lauderdale and Stuart. First time was in Boca Raton, about 20 miles from the start of my venture. It broke down again another 20 miles or so up in West Palm and finally in Stuart. If you searched for the term “hunk of junk” in the dictionary there’d be a picture of that outboard.

I replaced it with an old model 9.9 Mercury outboard. It took me from Stuart, across the state via the Okeechobee Waterway up to Carabelle in the eastern panhandle, and back down to Bradenton Beach where I live at anchor. Last year it took me from here to Cayo Costa and back, a journey of nearly 200 miles. The engine has worked like a charm for close to 2,000 miles. Its single shortcoming is that it’s a “short shaft” outboard and the prop cavitates when I’m rocked with the wakes of other boats and I really can’t use it when the seas are over 2 feet.

To work properly as auxiliary power for these small sailboats the outboards really need to be “long shaft.” Twenty inches, minimum, from where the engine attaches to the motor bracket to the cavitation plate rather than the 15 inches on the “short shaft” outboards. Five inches doesn’t seem like a lot. In fact, most women would scoff at that, but it makes a huge difference with an outboard motor. 

A little over a year ago I bought a second-hand Honda 9.9 long shaft 4 stroke outboard. I had another bracket, sometimes called a “jack stand” that I attached to the starboard side of the transom, and moved the Mercury to it, and put the Honda on the original bracket. 

I just never got the Honda working right. Problem with the idle speed. Since the Merc worked fine I never did what needed to be done to get the Honda working properly. So it sat on the stand for over a year. The bracket was never very good, either. I had to rig it with a block and tackle so I could raise and lower it when the Merc was on it. Over the year as the sailboat rocked and rolled in the wakes of passing boats and waves from storms the engine swayed back and forth on the stand. Sometimes worryingly so. Nothing I did with ropes got it to stay stationary.

I’ve been thinking about getting a BRAND NEW four stroke, long shaft motor for a long time. Actually since from about the time I bought the boat in the first place. But I needed to get rid of the Honda so I’d have a place to put a new motor. I DON’T want a used one. I want something BRAND NEW! I want something that if it poops I can take it in, after using the Merc to get me to the repair shop, and say, “Fix it! It’s on warranty!!!” 

Well, I sold the Honda a couple of weeks ago for almost as much as I paid for it. Damned thing was HEAVY. When it came off the bracket the rear end of the boat rose  a bit over two inches! I know, because the barnacles grow just at the waterline and there were over two inches of the buggers above the waterline with the engine gone.

Then I found that the bracket was frozen. The arms are slightly bent from the side to side action of the motor riding the waves. It’s impossible to raise or lower it. I bought a big breaker bar to try and get the bolts loosened up but no go. So the thing to do was to remove the bracket from the boat and see if I can straighten it out on shore. Easier said than done…

Heaven only knows how old the bracket is. Could be as old as the boat which was built in 1980! It’s attached to the transom by four bolts. Now, since I’m doing this unassisted, I have to slither through a small opening into the space beneath the cockpit seat to get to where the nuts are.

Once through that the space opens up a bit, but not a whole lot. Not enough to be able to sit up, so everything is done lying on my stomach. Here you can see where three of the bolts have been removed.

I got plenty of practice doing this sort of thing working as a rigger at a boatyard in New Orleans. But I’m 36 years older now, have arthritic hands, and less than 40% of normal lung capacity.

If everything goes well, HA! You work your way aft with your wrenches and take the bolt off. Easy Peasy, no? NO! These are lock-tight nuts. They have a plastic insert in the hole so they can’t vibrate loose.

I get the two lower bolts off easy enough. The top, inside nut is on an extra long bolt and the ratchet socket won’t fit over it. Of course I’m not prepared for this. I don’t have a box wrench or pliers with me . The top outside nut turns the bolt so it’s not coming loose.

Here’s why this is happening. Take a look at this more modern bracket.

See how the holes are square? They take bolts like these…

The square shoulders fit down into the squares on the bracket holes. This makes it easy to then go on the nut side of the bolt and fasten the nut without having someone on the outside holding it with a wrench to keep it from turning like happens with THESE…

 

 

Now I have to slither BACKWARDS out into the cabin to work out my next plan of attack. And don’t forget, I have serious COPD problems. I’m operating on about 40% of normal lung capacity so after doing something like getting out of the hole I have to sit for five minutes until my breathing gets back to what passes for normal.

I delve into my tool locker and dig out a pair of Vice Grips and my channel lock pliers. I don’t have a box wrench the proper size.  Over the side, into the dinghy and around to the bracket. I need to attach the Vice Grips to the bolt head. As the bolt is going to turn when I work on the nut, inside, the plier’s handle will also rotate until it comes to rest against one of the arms  keeping the bolt from turning further. OOOOPS. I know from experience that there’s a good chance the pliers might come loose. If that happens they’d fall into the water and be lost. So it’s back around to the side of the boat, up into the cockpit. Rest and catch my breath. Now, where the hell is that ball of twine? I’m not a super organized guy so it takes a while to find it. Back over the side into the dinghy. Around to the bracket. Hold on for a few minutes till my breathing is relaxed again.

After tying the twine to the pliers and securing it to a cleat,  I tighten the pliers onto the bolt head using both hands to lock them on. Back around to the side and up into the cockpit. Sit to catch my breath. Slither into the 16 inch hole and up to the transom. Rest to catch my breath. Use the channel locks to unfasten the nut. When it’s off I take the small hammer and whack away until the bolt end is flush with the transom. That sucker’s really in there. Rest for a few minutes to catch my breath. Agonizingly back out of the pit. Rest. Over the side into the dinghy and back to the bracket. pull the bolt the rest of the way out of the hole and reattach it to the remaining bolt head. Around to the side of the boat. Climb into the cockpit. Rest to catch my breath. Into the hole and work my way to the transom in a motion resembling an inch worm. Rest to catch my breath. Using the channel locks the nut starts working itself off the bolt. CLUNK! The Vice Grips have fallen off the bolt head. SHIT! F WORD! F WORD! F WORD!!!

Out of the hole. Rest. Into the dinghy and back to the bracket. See, I needed that twine. An eighth of a turn on the knob at the base of the pliers and a mighty squeeze with both hands gets them back on the bolt head. Around to the side of the boat, back in the cockpit. Rest. Back into the hole and inch worm my way to the transom. Rest. This time all’s good and the nut’s off. Back out of the hole. Rest. Over the side. Into the dinghy. Back to the bracket. Pull the bolt from the hole. Back to the side of the boat and into the cockpit. Rest. That part of the job is done.

Now I have to pry the bracket off of the transom. It’s stuck on, now, with silicone. Thank heaven it’s not done with 5200 which is the most tenacious adhesive sealant ever created. Silicone has the least adhesive properties of all the sealants, but there’s no telling how much was used when the bracket was attached. In any case, it won’t be easy getting it off. Since the holes on the old bracket are simply round, and not square like the new ones I’m not going to reuse it. I’ll buy a new bracket.

I’ve found a nearby marina down in Longboat Key has four stroke, 6 hp long shafts for sale for $1,650. That’s $200 less than the equivalent Mercury or Suzuki which will cover the cost of a new bracket. And, they’ll bring it up to me. They have to order it first, so it will take a while. Meanwhile I’ll work on removing the old bracket, order and install a new one.

WHEW!

 

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February 12, 2019 · 9:47 am

Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way

It will be no surprise to anyone when I say I LOVE weird boats and the people who construct them. So Imagine how much I enjoyed seeing this boat drift into the Bradenton Beach, FL, anchorage this morning and beach out in front of the Bridge Tender Waterfront Bar.

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The owner’s name is Dean and he likes traveling around and poking into out of the way places with his canoe. But, he said, it was too unstable to allow him to go certain places. So, he took a Standup Paddleboard and but it in half along the centerline. Topped it off with some light plywood. The amas are held in place with construction extrusions and everything is put together with hurricane clips and wing nuts so it can be easily assembled and disassembled.The mast sail comes from a small day sailer. The jib is an old shower curtain and is self furling with a snap shackle fitting.

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The lee boards were made from pine that he bought at Home Depot and glassed over. EVERYTHING was either scrounged, donated or came from a big box hardware store. He has a sleeping bag and a tarp to hide under when it rains. He spent the previous night anchored down in Sarasota Bay somewhere and was heading back there soon after we finished out conversation.

Never forget, whether you’re Dean on your cobbled together trimaran or a multi million dollar yacht the sunset’s exactly the same…

Oh, and as far as I’m concerned the crowning touch is the little mermaid figurehead!

figurehead

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September 3, 2018 · 11:48 am

That Time Of Year…

September is the most active month for tropical cyclones as they’re properly called. Here it is, the third day of the month and we’re already on edge…

“Oh, you live on a boat…that must be really cool.” That’s reason 347 for punching someone in the face.

Here’s what’s happening in MY world today.

STORM

Lots of wind and rain. Have two anchors set. Got food and water. Generator is running and charging computer, iPad and phone.

Enjoy YOUR Labor Day!

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December 31, 2017 · 5:11 pm

Back Again for 2018

I have been horribly neglectful in maintaining this blog. Last post was back around April. It isn’t that I haven’t been writing about what’s been happening, I simply have been posting on, gasp, shame, Facebook instead of here.

It would be impossible to explain all that’s happened since the last post so I’ll try and do it succinctly.

Because of deteriorating health problems with my COPD and the fact that Medicare doesn’t pay a penny once you step outside the boundaries of the country I was forced to leave my beloved Boquerón, Chiriqui, Panama and repatriate last April.

The only way I could afford to live in the states just having Social Security to depend was to buy a boa. It’s a small one, a Venture 22, and after fitting it out with my friend Stephen, I left Fort Lauderdale and headed north on the Intracoastal Waterway giving the Tangerine Twatwaffle’s Mar a Lago the finger as I passed.

earlier photo

The boat came with a 25hp Yamaha outboard. It was just all wrong for this boat. Over powered, overly heavy and the damned thing quit on me three times between Fort Lauderdale and Stuart. While there I exchanged it for a 9.9 Mercury which is the max recommended for the boat. Never a moment’s problem with it. It took me across the Okeechobee Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico and then all the way up into the panhandle of the state to Carrabelle. I had been planning on going all the way to Louisiana to look at what little was left of Breton Island where I’d run crew boats in the Kerr-McGee oil production field for a couple of years. With all the hurricanes since 1978 what was once an island about a half mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide where we actually lived at night has been reduced to a couple of hundred square yards total. I just wanted to see it once more.

But the dream died in Carrabelle. I’d had a complete loss of appetite for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t that I was sickly. I just lost interest in eating. I collapsed in the office of the marina there on the 4th of July. On the 5th I departed and headed toward Bradenton Beach, a few miles below Tampa Bay. I knew a couple of people there; a lady I’d met in Panama and her sons. I thought I’d go there to spend the winter months.

Some 15 miles out in the Gulf at about 2 a.m. I could barely breath and was unable to sit up. I dug out my little 6-watt handheld VHF radio and called “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” The Coast Guard station in Mobile, Alabama, heard my call and after determining my GPS position they sent a boat that evacuated me to shore where an ambulance waited and took me to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. I’d planned on having a nice lobster dinner for my 75th birthday on the 9th but ended up eating hospital fare instead.

In all I spent 17 days in either Tallahassee Memorial or Health South Rehab Hospital before getting back on my boat which had been towed into Panacea harbor and heading down to Bradenton Beach.

Why Bradenton Beach?

  • It has a great free anchorage and dinghy dock. There are a number of other smaller anchorages nearby.

anchored here

  • Access to good public transportation that makes owning a car unnecessary. On Anna Maria Island, of which Bradenton Beach is but one of three towns, there is a FREE “trolley” service that runs every 20 minutes from 6 a.m.to 10 p.m. Okay, they aren’t really trolleys; just buses made to look sort of like New Orleans street cars or San Francisco cable cars. They run past Walgreens and CVS pharmacies, Publix supermarket, Ace and True Value hardware stores, and, as it happens, one of the stops is half a block away from my new doctor’s office.

TROLLEY

  • If I need to go over to the mainland there are two Manatee County Transit buses. They go by Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe’s, Winn-Dixie supermarket, West Marine and tons of restaurants and fast food emporiums. The #6 bus also ruAftns by Blake Memorial Medical Center, one of the two hospitals close by. The cost for old timers like me is 75¢ but I buy an “unlimited” fare card for $20. The only problem with this is it’s only once an hour but I know know when I need to get to the bus stop to catch one. Also learning when it passes other places I go to like Wally World, etc.
  • The #6 bus runs right past the Y that I’ve enrolled in. Gives me use of their indoor heated swimming pool, a fantastic spa with ultra-modern exercise equipment and, best of all, HOT SHOWERS. There are no showers on 22-foot sailboats.
  • I know a couple of people here. One is a lady I actually met down in Panama who is a native of Bradenton and moved back here just after I did and lives with her two adult sons.

I’d been in Bradenton Beach for about a month when I developed severe chest pains. Not a heart attack, wrong side of the chest and having already HAD a heart attack it wasn’t the same kind of pain. I got myself ashore, got a cab and went to Blake’s emergency room where I was admitted for a four-day stay. Underwent several CAT scans, ultra sounds, X-rays and an endoscopy to discover I had a “very large” duodenal ulcer. Meds have brought that under control.

A month and a half ago my new doctor gave me a sample of something called Breo Ellipta for my breathing. This is a totally unsolicited endorsement of the product. It has literally changed the quality of my life for the better.

It’s expensive even after my insurance discount (I’ll pay $265 a month until my med costs have reached $600 then I can apply to the manufacturer for help). It doesn’t stop me from getting short of breath but those times aren’t nearly as severe as without the Breo.

I still need the Ventolin inhaler but since starting on the Breo a month ago I’m using it A LOT LESS THAN BEFORE. I had been buying an inhaler about every two weeks. Today I stopped by the pharmacy and bought another one to have in reserve. My insurance knocked off a whopping $6 (welcome to America, Richard) off the cost so what cost me $9.35 over the counter in Panama is now costing me $53.01 here) BUT I still have 58 puffs left from the 200 each inhaler starts with AND the pharmacist checked and I bought this last one on November 23. A MONTH AGO!!

Let me fill you in on some of the places I stopped at on my cruise in no particular order:

  • Indian Town. It’s on the Okeechobee waterway east of the lake itself and has a nice little marina. There’s very little to the town except for a few restaurants, a couple of banks, a hardware store and a road OUT! There was a resident alligator at the marina.

Indiantown Marina

  • Cedar Key. I’d read a lot of good things about events that go on there on Facebook. Place was a total disappointment. On the way north I didn’t even stopped. Looked around and the continued on to…
  • Suwannee River. Yes, Virginia, there is such a place. It’s hauntingly beautiful, too. On the Gulf side it’s very reminiscent of the Cajun Country marshlands. The river, itself, reminded me a lot of the Atchafalaya River with it’s huge stands of cypress trees. The town of Suwannee is nearly nonexistent. Desolation might be an improvement. There are two marinas where you can get fuel and basic marine supplies. One of them has a restaurant that’s open for breakfast and lunch and is famous for serving the WORLD’S WORST MEATLOAF! There’s a small store about a half mile away from that marina with a limited amount of groceries for which they rip your eyeballs out on prices but it’s the ONLY store around. In all I spend TWO WEEKS anchored around in the river, a week going north and then coming south. I had to wait on the weather because I wasn’t about to go out in the open Gulf of Mexico in 25 mph winds in a 22 foot boat.

Suwannee River

  • Oh, and once I left Bradenton Beach on the run north I also ran out of phone contact and had no internet connection. One of my readers, not having seen me publish anything on Facebook for almost two weeks called the Coast Guard and reported me “missing and over due.” When I finally found out the Coasties were trying to find me and contacted them by radio they said they were within a couple of hours of actually sending out planes to search for me!!!
  • Carrabelle. Easternmost panhandle port. Nice run up the river past several small marinas to the large Moorings Marina. Docks are a bit shabby, but the free breakfast every morning more than makes up for that. The Moorings is a convenient place for cruisers to stop. Restaurants within easy walking distance. Fairly decently stocked IGA grocery store across the street. Ace Hardware a block away.
  • Panacea. In the panhandle. Well protected harbor. One dry stack marina but with gas and a restaurant. Nothing town.

Panacea Harbor entrance

  • Econfina River. Good anchorage inside the river but a long way from anything. Just a scenic overnight spot if you’re coast-crawling through the big bend. Spent two nights there coming and going.

Sunrise on Econfina River, FL

  • Keyton Beach. There is absolutely NO REASON for a cruising boat to stop here! No town. No fuel. Shallow anchorage.
  • Steinhatchee. (Pronounced STEEN hatchee). It’s a LONG HAUL from the Gulf into the river where there are two marinas usually full up. Restaurants are available with wifi. Dozens of sailboats anchored along the river above the marinas. It’s an endless boat parade as people pour down from the launch ramps north of the anchorage and on out to the open water. August is scallop season and it’s absolutely nutso. There’s one small combo gas station/food store there about a quarter mile walk from Hungry Howie’s restaurant. They have a small floating dock and if you buy a little something from them they’ll let you tie up for a bit to go shopping.
  • Crystal River. A couple of marinas. Limited good anchorages where you don’t get bounced around on the wakes from the endless parade of boats, especially on the weekend. No shopping available. One marina has a brilliant marketing ploy. They are at the very end of the river selling gas. You have to motor about 10 miles in from the Gulf to get to it and then back of course so you burn up a lot of fuel. As you run up the river you notice hundreds of palm tree trunks without tops that were torn off from various storms and hurricanes.

Crystal River Sand Island 2

  • Port Richie. There’s a NEW Port Richie but you get to this long before you get to that. Coming in the long entrance (they’re ALL long along the shallow Gulf coast north of Dunedin) you pass what the charts euphemistically call “Shacks” but they’re pretty grand retreats built out on the water on pilings. Very reminiscent of “Stiltsville” that was located in Biscayne Bay near Miami but succumbed to numerous hurricanes. There’s a nice little marine store and gas dock up towards the end of the river. There are a couple of restaurants, including a Hooters with free wifi and off to the left there’s a good-sized pond, Miller’s Bayou, that’s an excellent anchorage. All together I spent about five days anchored there going and coming because of the weather.

Miller's Bayou 2

  • Tarpon Springs. Go if you must. I wasn’t impressed. There are a couple of places to go get fuel. A small anchorage not too far in from the Gulf near a public park and boat ramp.

Sunrise over Tarpon Springs

  • Hernando Beach. There is only ONE reason for a cruising sailor to stop at this place and you have to have a very shallow draft vessel to do it. That is if you’re sleepy and the next anchorage is too far for your physical condition. If you go up a long, long, winding, narrow channel and come to the town you’ll find absolutely NOTHING for you. No marinas, no fuel, no shopping no place to anchor. But, back down, not too far from the channel entrance, on the north side of the channel there’s a series of rocky spoil islands and inside that a rather large bay with a low water depth of a little more than 3 feet. I anchored in their just behind the seaward-most island. It gave me excellent protection from the vicious wakes of the power boaters and commercial fishing boats that pass by in a constant stream. Otherwise, avoid the place.
  • A little ways north of Tampa Bay, and just south of the Welsh Causeway bridge, over on the northeast side of the waterway in the shadow of the Veteran’s Hospital there is an excellent anchorage with decent protection all around. And one of the best shantyboats I’ve ever seen…

Then there was Hurricane Irma to contend with. Early on all of the “spaghetti” models, save one, had the storm tracking up the east coast of Florida. That one had it traveling right up here over Bradenton Beach! While everyone was saying it looked like we were going to be in the clear I kept saying, “You watch, that bitch is coming up the single, solitary path on all the forecasts. Guess who was right?!?

I struck the mast and then headed out of the anchorage as most of the boats did, but I went where none of the others did. I went across the ICW and under a little bridge and up a narrow canal. After the canal turned 90  degrees to the right I found another narrow canal that seemed like a good place to check out. It was so narrow in there that I’d be unable to turn around so I backed down into it. A couple of hundred yards in I found an indentation in the mangroves that lined both banks and headed into it. It was perfect! Two thirds of my port side was covered by thick mangroves and half of my starboard side was. Ahead of me was a jungle of trees and astern, across the sliver of canal there were three, two-story, cinder block houses and, more mangroves.

I got half a dozen lines into the trees and hunkered down for the storm. That was the worst of it. The anticipation. Then, two days after I secured myself the storm started picking up. The wind literally blew the water out of Tampa Bay, only a couple of miles north of me, and I ended up with 2/3rds of the boat sitting on the mucky bottom. Fortunately the Venture 22 has a swing keel and a flat bottom and will float in just a foot of water. I was actually looking UP at the ground level from my cockpit!

As the winds increased they simply blew right over my head. In fact, before the eye neared us I went to bed. In the morning the winds were replaced with rain and when I was able to stick my head out into the open I found that the worst thing I’d suffered from the hurricane was about a gazillion mangrove leaves covering nearly every inch of the deck. I stayed put for another day before returning back over to the anchorage. Some of the boats that hadn’t moved to safer shelter were still doing well, but looking around the whole anchorage area seven boats had sunk.

hidden

mangroves2

I decided to leave the mast down. In the several hundred miles I covered from Fort Lauderdale, across the state on the Okeechobee Waterway and then up to Carrabelle in the Panhandle and back down to Bradenton Beach I actually only sailed four times. The rest of the time it was a combination of things…too much wind, not enough wind, or the wind was coming from the wrong direction.

Having the mast lying down on deck as it was for the hurricane was unacceptable and a nuisance. So I made a “gallows” for it out of PVC piping. It now sits up in the air, low enough that I’d be able to get under any bridge with at least 10 vertical clearance and yet I can stand upright under it back by the tiller. It also makes a wonderful anchor for a tarp to protect the cockpit and over the hatchway.

MAST VERTICLE.jpg

There have been some nice days here at the anchorage…

Rainbow central.jpg

SUNSET 2

Some were downright scary!!! This is less than a quarter mile from where I’m anchored.

spout 1

Well, that wraps it up. I’m not promising that I’ll be a LOT better than I have been, but I will be SOMEWHAT better.

Happy 2018!

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June 26, 2014 · 11:44 am

Watch This Spot For Future Developments

I haven’t been sleeping well since the shanty boat bug bit me again. I’ll go to bed and then wake up at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning as 72 year old men are wont to do, but then when I lay down again my mind keeps churning about all the possibilities of  this venture that I can’t get back to sleep. So a half hour, forty-five minutes later I’m up again and roaming around on the computer.

Here’s one of the hurdles I have to overcome…

Where I Am

As you can see by the yellow stick pin where I am and where the boat should be are quite far apart. Not only that, running right smack between those two pins is the continental divide. A mountain chain thousands of feet high!

I have a complete set of plans for a shanty boat called the Brandy Bar

brandy-bar

It’s 25 feet long and 10 feet wide. That would make it too wide to put on a trailer and truck over the hills to Almirante where it could be launched. The construction is pretty straight forward. It’s like building a house because everything is right angles and no complex compound curves. It would be pretty simple to simply modify the plans and scale the beam down to 8 feet so it would be trailerable.

Another problem is cost. Even scrimping on things like interior design and not counting such essentials as navigation lights, anchors with their chain and rode, regular lighting, cooking facilities, etc., etc., the bare hull would cost around $4K!

Then we get into construction problems themselves. 1) The best source for marine plywood is over there in Bocas del Toro. I live here in Boquerón. For those of you not familiar with boat building, real marine plywood is expensive stuff. Without getting into a big dissertation about how plywood is made I’ll just say there’s “Marine Ply,’ ‘AB’, ‘BC’ and stuff called ‘CDX.’ The letters all refer to the condition of the outermost ply, and the X means ‘exterior.’ All need to have exterior grade glues so the plies won’t delaminate.  The supplier I know of charges $99.95 for a 3/4″ sheet of the stuff. Tack on Panama’s 7% tax and each sheet come in at $106.95. There are approximately 18 sheets needed to build a Brandy Bar or $1,925.00 worth of plywood! He also carries CDX which costs $54.95 for a 3/4” sheet. That would cut the plywood costs to $1,058.33.

Now all that doesn’t include the framing lumber. There are 21 frames that need to be built with 2X6 inch, pressure treated lumber. Each of the frames requires 14′ of the stuff. An 8′, pressure treated 2X6 costs $14.12 (tax included). Each frame is 3′ high, so the lumber for the framing comes in at about $77.00 whether you’re building with top rated marine ply of CDX.

I was also directed, yesterday, to a place that’s supposed to sell plywood in David. What I’ve seen so far has been disappointing, but I’ll check out the new place in the next few days.

And that’s just what the lumber costs. Add in epoxy resins which are far from cheap and which I haven’t even tried to price out though I did find out about a place in David that sells it, fiberglass mat for protecting the hull against ship worms down here (Columbus abandoned two of his boats here in Panama in 1502 because of ship worms). And so on and so on with expenses.

Another problem arises in the building process. You have to build the damned hull upside down on a kind of large jig to hold the framing in place while you’re putting on the plywood sheeting and glassing it all together.

upside downSo, when it’s all sheeted and the fiberglassing is done you have to do this…

flipping itYou have to turn it over so you can build the cabin. And the flippin’ thing is HEAVY right now. (The last two photos courtesy [though they don’t know it yet] of http://littleshantyboat.blogspot.com/ which is one of the best blogs I’ve read anywhere about the actual building process of a shanty boat. If you’re interested in building one you need to bookmark this site.)

So, the other night I was talking to my surfing friend, David, who lives in Costa Rica but who is thinking about resettling, too, in Bocas, when an idea hit me. . .

From time immemorial boats and ships have been built as a single unit. The keel was laid down, frames were attached to that and planking was added to the frames to complete the hull. Instead of building my 25′ long by 8′ wide hull as a single unit, why couldn’t I build, say, units that were 8’X8′ which would be a lot lighter in weight and them, with epoxy, through-bolt those units together? Sort of like putting Legos® together.  Why not, indeed? I mean they build HUGE ships and aircraft carriers that way, now, don’t they?

If they can build something as big as an aircraft carrier in sections and, essentially, bolt the pieces together why couldn’t I do the same thing with something so simple as a shanty boat?

So, naturally, this set me off in other sleepless wanderings around the internet. I found a TON of stuff. From Viet Nam there was this: http://www.hapby.v-nam.net/builds/projects.php,   And this: http://shantyboatliving.com/2012/collaborative-modular-project-post-1/ Plus a bunch more, but you get the idea.

Four Puddle Duck Racers bolted together would make a 16’X8′ hull. Six of them and you’ve got a 24X8. Four of them with a deck covering the top of each one, and joined with spanning  members floored over and you’ve got yourself the pontoons and platform for a pretty large floating home.

And here, too, you don’t have to build it all at once. You can build something large enough (or small enough) to give you a place to live in while you construct further modules. My uncle Dick and his wife Helen lived in the basement of their house in Cincinnati, Ohio while they were building the big house. My secret heros, Jim Kimball and Jay Viola (not to mention their wives who worked just as hard as they did, though in the States) built a fabulous Eco Resort, Tranquilo Bay (http://www.tranquilobay.com/) on the island of Bastimentos  in Bocas del Toro, Panama, piece by piece, and they lived in a TENT on a rickety dock when they started the venture. You really SHOULD read this story, it’s absolutely inspiring about what guts and determination can accomplish…http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080501/paradise-the-hard-way.html I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with Jim Kimball a few years ago when I was making my first exploratory trips to Panama and it would be hard to find a nicer person  willing to sit down with a total stranger for a couple of hours and discuss the stranger’s crackpot ideas of building a shanty boat.

So, there you have it. I’m sure there will be many more sleepless nights ahead because of this nonsense. My birthday is only a couple of weeks away. I think this year I’m going to gift myself with some power tools. I’ll show you when I get them.

 

 

 

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January 25, 2012 · 6:00 am

The Liveaboard Simulator redux

Recently I came across a blog about a young couple who bought a boat to live on and sail around the world. They’re living on it, the” sail around the world” part is yet to be started. I’ve wasted hours of my time when I should have been working on my new book reading their blog http://ventureminimalists.wordpress.com/ but it’s certainly been entertaining. And reading about their struggles with the new life of living aboard a boat I’m sure they would have been better prepared had they read my June 2009 post “The Liveaboard Simulator.” Hey, t.v. networks have re-runs…why shouldn’t I?

Just for fun, park your cars in the lot of the convenience store at least 2 blocks from your house. (Make believe the sidewalk is a floating dock between your car and the house.

Move yourself and your family (If applicable) into 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. Measure the DECK space INSIDE your boat. Make sure the occupied house has no more space, or closet space, or drawer space.

Boats don’t have room for “beds”, as such. Fold your Sealy Posturepedic up against a wall, it won’t fit on a boat. Go to a hobby fabric store and buy a foam pad 5′ 10″ long and 4′ wide AND NO MORE THAN 3″ THICK. Cut it into a triangle so the little end is only 12″ wide. This simulates the foam pad in the V-berth up in the pointy bow of the sailboat. Bring in the kitchen table from the kitchen you’re not allowed to use. Put the pad UNDER the table, on the floor, so you can simulate the 3′ of headroom over the pad.
Block off both long sides of the pad, and the pointy end so you have to climb aboard the V-berth from the wide end where your pillows will be. The hull blocks off the sides of a V-berth and you have to climb up over the end of it through a narrow opening (hatch to main cabin) on a boat. You’ll climb over your mate’s head to go to the potty in the night. No fun for either party. Test her mettle and resolve by getting up this way right after you go to bed at night. There are lots of things to do on a boat and you’ll forget at least one of them, thinking about it laying in bed, like “Did I remember to tie off the dingy better?” or “Is that spring line (at the dock) or anchor line (anchored out) as tight as it should be?” Boaters who don’t worry about things like this laying in bed are soon aground or on fire or the laughing stock of an anchorage…. You need to find out how much climbing over her she will tolerate BEFORE you’re stuck with a big boat and big marina bills and she refuses to sleep aboard it any more…..

Bring a Coleman stove into the bathroom and set it next to the bathroom sink. Your boat’s sink is smaller, but we’ll let you use the bathroom sink, anyways. Do all your cooking in the bathroom, WITHOUT using the bathroom power vent. If you have a boat vent, it’ll be a useless 12v one that doesn’t draw near the air your bathroom power vent draws to take away cooking odors. Leave the hall door open to simulate the open hatch. Take all the screens off your 2 bedroom’s windows. Leave the windows open to let in the bugs that will invade your boat at dusk, and the flies attracted to the cooking.

Borrow a 25 gallon drum mounted on a trailer. Flush your toilets into the drums. Trailer the drums to the convenience store to dump them when they get full. Turn off your sewer, you won’t have one. This will simulate going to the “pump out station” every time the tiny drum is full. 25 gallons is actually LARGER than most holding tanks.They’re more like 15 gallons on small sailboats under 40′ because they were added to the boat after the law changed requiring them and there
was no place to put it or a bigger one. They fill up really fast if you liveaboard!

Unless your boat is large enough to have a big “head” with full bath, make believe your showers/bathtubs don’t work. Make a deal with someone next door to the convenience store to use THEIR bathroom for bathing at the OTHER end of the DOCK. (Marina rest room) If you use this rest room to potty, while you’re there, make believe it has no paper towels or toilet paper. Bring your own. Bring your own soap and anything else you’d like to use there, too.

If your boat HAS a shower in its little head, we’ll let you use the shower end of the bathtub, but only as much tub as the boat has FREE shower space for standing to shower. As the boat’s shower drains into a little pan in the bilge, be sure to leave the soapy shower water in the bottom of the tub for a few days before draining it. Boat shower sumps always smell like spent soap growing exotic living organisms science hasn’t actually discovered or named, yet. Make sure your simulated V-berth is
less than 3′ from this soapy water for sleeping. The shower sump is under the passageway to the V-berth next to your pillows.

Run you whole house through a 20 amp breaker to simulate available dock power at the marina. If you’re thinking of anchoring out, turn off the main breaker and “make do” with a boat battery and flashlights. Don’t forget you have to heat your house on this 20A supply and try to keep the water from freezing in winter.

Turn off the water main valve in front of your house. Run a hose from your neighbor’s lawn spigot over to your lawn spigot and get all your water from there. Try to keep the hose from freezing all winter.

As your boat won’t have a laundry, disconnect yours. Go to a boat supply place, like West Marine, and buy you a dock cart. Haul ALL your supplies, laundry, garbage, etc. between the car at the convenience store and house in this cart. Once a week, haul your outboard motor to the car, leave it a day then haul it back to the house, in the cart, to simulate “boat problems” that require “boat parts” to be removed/replaced on your “dock”. If ANYTHING ever comes out of that cart between the convenience store and the house, put it in your garage and forget about it. (Simulates losing it over the side of the dock, where it sank in 23′ of water and was dragged off by the current.)

Each morning, about 5AM, have someone you don’t know run a weedeater back and forth under your bedroom windows to simulate the fishermen leaving the marina to go fishing. Have him slam trunk lids, doors, blow car horns and bang some heavy pans together from 4AM to 5AM before lighting off the weedeater. (Simulates loading boats with booze and fishing gear and gas cans.) Once a week, have him bang the running weedeater into your bedroom wall to simulate the idiot who
drove his boat into the one you’re sleeping in because he was half asleep leaving the dock. Put a rope over a big hook in the ceiling over your coffee table “bed”. Hook one end of the rope to the coffee table siderail and the other end out where he can pull on it. As soon as he shuts off the weedeater, have him pull hard 9 times on the rope to tilt your bed at least 30 degrees. (Simulates the wakes of the fishermen blasting off trying to beat each other to the fishing.) Anytime there is a storm in your area, have someone constantly pull on the rope. It’s rough riding storms in the marina! If your boat is a sailboat, install a big wire from the top of the tallest tree to your electrical ground in the house to simulate mast lightning strikes in the marina, or to give you the thought of potential lightning strikes.

Each time you “go out”, or think of going boating away from your marina, disconnect the neighbor’s water hose, your electric wires, all the umbilicals your new boat will use to make life more bearable in the marina.

Use bottled drinking water for 2 days for everything. Get one of those 5 gallon jugs with the airpump on top from a bottled water company. This is your boat’s “at sea” water system simulator. You’ll learn to conserve water this way. Of course, not having the marina’s AC power supply, you’ll be lighting and all from a car battery, your only source of power. If you own or can borrow a generator, feel free to leave it running to provide AC power up to the limit of the generator. If you’re thinking about a 30′ sailboat, you won’t have room for a generator so don’t use it.

Any extra family members must be sleeping on the settees in the maincabin or in the quarter berth under the cockpit….unless you intend to get a boat over 40-something feet with an aft cabin. Smaller boats have quarter berths. Cut a pad out of the same pad material that is no more than 2′ wide by 6′ long. Get a cardboard box from an appliance store that a SMALL refridgerator came in. Put the pad in the box, cut to fit, and make sure only one end of the box is open. The box can be no more than 2 feet above the pad. Quarter berths are really tight. Make them sleep in there, with little or no air circulation. That’s what sleeping in a quarterberth is all about.

Of course, to simulate sleeping anchored out for the weekend, no heat or air conditioning will be used and all windows will be open without screens so the bugs can get in.

In the mornings, everybody gets up and goes out on the patio to enjoy the sunrise. Then, one person at a time goes back inside to dress, shave, clean themselves in the tiny cabin unless you’re a family of nudists who don’t mind looking at each other in the buff. You can’t get dressed in the stinky little head with the door closed on a sailboat. Hell, there’s barely room to bend over so you can sit on the commode. So, everyone will dress in the main cabin….one at a time.

Boat tables are 2′ x 4′ and mounted next to the settee. There’s no room for chairs in a boat. So, eat off a 2X4′ space on that kitchen table you slept under while sitting on a couch (settee simulator). You can also go out with breakfast and sit on the patio (cockpit), if you like.

Ok, breakfast is over. Crank up the lawnmower under the window for 2 hours. It’s time to recharge the batteries from last night’s usage and to freeze the coldplate in the boat’s icebox which runs off a compressor on the engine. Get everybody to clean up your little hovel. Don’t forget to make the beds from ONE END ONLY. You can’t get to the other 3 sides of a boat bed pad.

All hands go outside and washdown the first fiberglass UPS truck that passes by. That’s about how big the deck is on your 35′ sailboat that needs to have the ocean cleaned off it daily or it’ll turn the white fiberglass all brown like the UPS truck. Now, doesn’t the UPS truck look nice like your main deck?

Ok, we’re going to need some food, do the laundry, buy some boat parts that failed because the manufacturer’s bean counters got cheap and used plastics and the wife wants to “eat out, I’m fed up with cooking on the Coleman stove” today. Let’s make believe we’re not at home, but in some exotic port like Ft Lauderdale, today….on our cruise to Key West……Before “going ashore”, plan on buying all the food you’ll want to eat that will:

A – Fit into the Coleman Cooler on the floor
B – You can cook on the Coleman stove without an oven or all those
fancy kitchen tools you don’t have on the boat
C – And will last you for 10 days, in case the wind drops and it takes more time than we planned at sea.
Plan meals carefully in a boat. We can’t buy more than we can STORE, either!

You haven’t washed clothes since you left home and everything is dirty. Even if it’s not, pretend it is for the boater-away-from-home simulator. Put all the clothes in your simulated boat in a huge dufflebag so we can take it to the LAUNDRY! Manny’s Marina HAS a laundromat, but the hot water heater is busted (for the last 8 months) and Manny has “parts on order” for it…..saving Manny $$$$ on the electric bill! Don’t forget to carry the big dufflebag with us on our
“excursion”. God that bag stinks, doesn’t it?….PU!

Of course, we came here by BOAT, so we don’t have a car. Some nice marinas have a shuttle bus, but they’re not a taxi. The shuttle bus will only go to West Marine or the tourist traps, so we’ll be either taking the city bus, if there is one or taxi cabs or shopping at the marina store which has almost nothing to buy at enormous prices.

Walk to the 7-11 store, where you have your car stored, but ignore the car. Make believe it isn’t there. No one drove it to Ft Lauderdale for you. Use the payphone at the 7-11 and call a cab. Don’t give the cab driver ANY instructions because in Ft Lauderdale you haven’t the foggiest idea where West Marine is located or how to get there, unlike at home.
We’ll go to West Marine, first, because if we don’t the “head” back on the boat won’t be working for a week because little Suzy broke a valve in it trying to flush some paper towels. This is your MOST important project, today….that valve in the toilet!! After the cab drivers drives around for an hour looking for West Marine and asking his dispatcher how to get there. Don’t forget to UNLOAD your stuff from the cab, including the dirty clothes in the dufflebag then go into West Marine and give the clerk a $100 bill, simulating the cost of toilet parts. Lexus parts are cheaper than toilet parts at West Marine. See for yourself! The valve she broke, the seals that will have to be replaced on the way into the valve will come to $100 easy. Tell the clerk you’re using my liveaboard simulator and to take his girlfriend out to dinner on your $100 greenback. If you DO buy the boat, this’ll come in handy when you DO need boat parts because he’ll remember you for the great time his girlfriend gave him on your $100 tip. Hard-to-find boat parts will arrive in DAYS, not months like the rest of us. It’s just a good political move while in simulation mode.

Call another cab from West Marine’s phone, saving 50c on payphone charges. Load the cab with all your stuff, toilet parts, DIRTY CLOTHES then tell the cabbie to take you to the laundromat so we can wash the stinky clothes in the trunk. The luxury marina’s laundry in Ft Lauderdale has a broken hot water heater. They’re working on it, the girl at the store counter, said, yesterday. Mentioning the $12/ft you paid to park the boat at their dock won’t get the laundry working before we leave for Key West. Do your laundry in the laundromat the cabbie found for you. Just because noone speaks English in this
neighborhood, don’t worry. You’ll be fine this time of day near noon.

Call another cab to take us out of here to a supermarket. When you get there, resist the temptation to “load up” because your boat has limited storage and very limited refridgeration space (remember? Coleman Cooler).

Buy from the list we made early this morning. Another package of cookies is OK. Leave one of the kids guarding the pile of clean laundry just inside the supermarket’s front door….We learned our lesson and DIDN’T forget and leave it in the cab, again!

Call another cab to take us back to the marina, loaded up with clean clothes and food and all-important boat parts. Isn’t Ft Lauderdale beautiful from a cab? It’s too late to go exploring, today. Maybe tomorrow…. Don’t forget to tell the cab to go to the 7-11 (marina parking lot)….not your front door….cabs don’t float well.

Ok, haul all the stuff in the dock cart from the 7-11 store the two blocks to the “boat” bedroom. Wait 20 minutes before starting out for the house. This simulates waiting for someone to bring back a marina-owned dock cart from down the docks…..They always leave them outside their boats, until the marina “crew” get fed up with newbies like us asking why there aren’t any carts and go down the docks to retrieve them.

Put all the stuff away, food and clothes, in the tiny drawer space provided. Have a beer on the patio (cockpit) and watch the sunset. THIS is living!

Now, disassemble the toilet in your bathroom, take out the wax ring under it and put it back. Reassemble the toilet. This completes the simulation of putting the new valve in the “head” on the boat. Uh, uh, NO POWER VENT! GET YOUR HAND OFF THAT SWITCH! The whole “boat” smells like the inside of the holding tank for hours after fixing the toilet in a real boat, too! Spray some Lysol if you got it….

After getting up, tomorrow morning, from your “V-Berth”, take the whole family out to breakfast by WALKING to the nearest restaurant, then take a cab to any local park or attraction you like. We’re off today to see the sights of Ft Lauderdale…..before heading out to sea, again, to Key West. Take a cab back home after dinner out and go to bed, exhausted, on your little foam pad under the table…..

Get up this morning and disconnect all hoses, electrical wires, etc. Get ready for “sea”. Crank up the lawn mower under the open bedroom window for 4 hours while we motor out to find some wind. ONE responsible adult MUST be sitting on the hot patio all day, in shifts, “on watch” looking out for other boats, ships, etc. If you have a riding lawn mower, let the person “on watch” drive it around the yard all day to simulate driving the boat down the ICW in heavy traffic. About 2PM, turn off the engine and just have them sit on the mower “steering” it on the patio. We’re under sail, now. Every hour or so, take everyone out in the yard with a big rope and have a tug-of-war to simulate the work involved with setting sail, changing sail, trimming sail. Make sure everyone gets all sweaty in the heat. Sailors working on sailboats are always all sweaty or we’re not going anywhere fast! Do this all day, today, all night, tonight, all day, tomorrow, all night tomorrow night and all day the following day until 5PM when you “arrive” at the next port you’re going to. Make sure no one in the family leaves the confines of the little bedroom or the patio during our “trip”. Make sure everyone conserves water, battery power, etc., things you’ll want to conserve while being at sea on a trip somewhere. Everyone can go up to the 7-11 for an icecream as soon as we get the “boat” docked on day 3, the first time anyone has left the confines of the bedroom/patio in 3 days.

Question – Was anyone suicidal during our simulated voyage? Keep an eye out for anyone with a problem being cooped up with other family members. If anyone is attacked, any major fights break out, any threats to throw the captain to the fish…..forget all about boats and buy a motorhome, instead.

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