Swing Set: Cruising Full Time
11/08/12Six Months and CountingYes, we left St. Louis six months ago. It doesn't seem that long ago for us, so that's a sign that we must be enjoying the experience...and it's true. On Tuesday, Gary took me to the auto parts store, and we picked up our six Optima Marine batteries. By late afternoon, I had the old batteries out and the new ones installed. We had also gone by the Sea and Shore store here in Cape Coral and had some cables made up due to the fact that we were adding 50 percent more battery capacity in the form of six inverter batteries instead of four. Four feet worth of cables and eight shrink-wrapped ends with rings attached, that'll be 100 smackers, please. No wonder thieves are taking copper from anyplace they can get it. On Tuesday night, we went out with Gary and Judy and... |
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11/05/12Staying Busy In Cape CoralWe have some reasons why posts have been a little sparse lately. One is that, since we are staying in one spot for so long, we don't have much to offer that may be of any interest to anyone, or has nothing to do with our blog subject matter. The other is that our inverter bank of batteries has finally called it quits, so this requires us to start and run the generator to be able to write the blog. The generator is on right now, so we can cook dinner, so here we go... We were visited by the Florida Marine Patrol last week, and they wanted to check our head system to see if we were flushing the toilet overboard. We had taken the dinghy over to Gary and Judy's place, and we saw them come in and were over at one of the sailboats in the basin here. I took the dinghy back to... |
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10/29/12Some Maintenance IssuesWe've reached a resolution with John Bloch of Bloch Marine back in St. Louis, I believe satisfactorily, to everyone involved. I had originally desired an adjustment to our bill from our bottom paint job back in March because for some reason some paint has been flaking off and we didn't want to bear the cost of a new paint job so soon after just paying off the last paint job. Pulling the boat and pressure washing the bottom in order to inspect the rest of the hull would remove most of some good paint still on the boat, and not pressure washing could dry out any growth I may have missed when I scraped the hull a few weeks ago. And the growth could dry up and peel off, taking paint along with it. Given the extent of the flaking, John decided to adjust our bill and give us a... |
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10/25/12Life In Bimini Basin and Some Good NewsLet's get the good news out of the way; we signed a sales contract on our condo back in St. Louis via DocuSign on the computer. We've had our condo for sale for over three years, and while this is good news, we are settling on a price $80,000 less than where we started at, and the price includes all of our furniture, electronics, dishes and pots and pans...you name it. But the sale will be a big weight off our shoulders and will lessen our outlay every month, making our fixed income go farther. We have also been somewhat restricted in our travel due to not knowing when we might get an offer and have to be in a convenient area to close on the sale, something we will do here in Cape Coral in less than two weeks. We consider ourselves very lucky, as Cape Coral as a... |
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10/21/12Finally in Cape CoralWe left Englewood only an hour into high tide, and I was a little worried that we wouldn't have enough water to get out to the channel, but I changed the course that I took coming in to our anchorage and found a much deeper route, so we had no problem. The clear water soon gave way to a brackish brown as we neared Charlotte Harbor but again cleared up once we crossed the Boca Grande Pass. We were impressed with all of the recreational boat traffic that we began to see as we slipped by Pine Island, Captiva Pass and Sanibel Island. We were half-heartedly looking for an anchorage for the night, as we thought that we'd wait until our friends Gary and Judy were home for at least one night before we showed up and started disrupting their lives, but once we saw Fort Myers and... |
