May 15, 2009.

It’s been awhile since I’ve last written. We’ve been busy running around doing personal stuff, seeing people and taking care of land based issues. We’ve gotten everything accomplished that we wanted too so we’re clear to once again start heading north.

We spent today getting the boat squared away. If you remember we left our bicycles at the Far Niente’s house while we went to the Bahamas. So today we picked the bikes up and went about trying to figure out how the hell we ever put them in the boat.

We rearranged this and that and finally squeezed them into the vee berth. While we were at it we emptied several of the food lockers to bring our inventory up to date.

We keep most of our food stores in 6 different lockers. Posted out of sight, adjacent to each locker is an inventory of that locker’s contents. This way when you remove a jar of jelly, some salad dressing or a can of black beans you’re supposed to adjust the inventory sheet. Even though we try to keep everything accurate we have to do a physical inventory every 6 months or so.


The attached photos show the contents of just one of our lockers. Once reinventoried it was all put away and then it was on to the next locker.

I wanted to get underway on Saturday morning but the weather doesn’t seem to feel like cooperating. I’d like to go out Fort Pierce inlet and jump in the gulf stream and head straight for Beaufort, NC. Tomorrow would be a pleasant day on the water off the coast of Florida. The problem is that by the time we get up to South Carolina a cold front is supposed to pass through. Our 10 to 15 knot beam reach would morph into a 30 to 40 knot, on the nose, ass kicking. Been there, done that, don’t need to do it again.

What we really need is a nice 3 to 4 day window. We could go out and knock out part of the trip but then we’d be stuck for a day or 3 while the weather settles so we might as well do our waiting right here in Vero.