November 25, 2009.

We’re in Vero Beach and taking care of our final provisioning. We borrowed Solitaires car and spent $860 on food.
We had two shopping carts straining under maximum load. Several people took the time to question us as to why we were buying so much food. It’s pretty tough to try and food shop for a 6 month period. That was only the basic foods. We made separate trips later in the week for meats, bread and fresh vegetables.

After getting the meat home Christy broke the packages down into smaller, more user friendly portions that I resealed with a vacuum sealer. After that, all of it went into the freezer.

We also recommissioned the watermaker. We use a TDS meter to check the water for “solids” content. Anything less than 500 ppm is considered safe to drink. When we were in Washington, DC we checked the water coming from the taps there and found it to be at around 480 ppm. Here on the boat our water is consistently under 300 ppm. That’s some fine quality H²O.

While Christy was out shopping with Nancy I took the opportunity to attend a local car show with the Far Niente’s.



There were quite a few cars and most of them were in wonderful shape.

I also spent a bit of time up the mast of all 3 boats tied to our mooring. It seemed we all had niggling problems that needed some attention so we took care of them all one after the other. It was kind of like a crappy game show where everybody gets a chance to haul my fat ass up their mast.