November 21. We’ve been here in Vero Beach for a few days now. I’ve been having internet connectivity problems due to a wire being broken between our external antenna amplifier and our computer. Turns out that this wire is harder to find than an honest politician. We’ve been checking every store that may have it since we left Charleston, SC.

I called my brother and he was able to find a source for the cable that we need. They don’t even stock them, it had to be custom made for us. Now with our new cable we are able to “see” the Wifi hotspots out there, but we still can not connect. Back to square one…….it looks like we need more hardware and have ordered “something” that we hope will work.

Since we’ve been here I’ve been doing a lot of boat chores in an effort to get the boat ready for the trip to the Bahamas. I spent a day changing oil, cleaning the raw water strainer and cleaning electrical connections. I also removed the belts from the engine so we could take them down to NAPA to buy spares.

We’ve been collecting a pretty decent sized pile of spare parts. In the last 2 weeks we’ve bought spare primary and secondary fuel filters, oil filters, electrical fuses, impellers, new flares, rum, gasket material and spools of wire, just to name a few.

I also had the starter that we burned up 2 months ago rebuilt while we were here. That gives us a spare starter and 2 spare alternators. I need one more trip to West Marine on Friday for a special connector and that will complete the installation of our Skymate System. Skymate is a weather gathering system that uses satellites and your laptop to give you up to the minute weather forecasts, plus it will enable us to stay connected via email while we are traveling. Hopefully, it will earn its keep while we’re in the Bahamas. I also replaced the guts of our oven. Christy uses the stove all the time but we really haven’t had the need for the oven, but it was time to fix it. Think turkey.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving so we’ll be taking the day off to attend the cruisers Thanksgiving party. There are over 60 boatloads of people signed up, everyone brings a dish to share, it should be pretty good.

That’ll leave us with Friday and Saturday to finish up our list of projects before we get underway on Sunday morning. As the plan stands right now we’ll start slowly (as long as it stays warm) heading south until we get to Marathon. We’re planning to spend the Holidays in Marathon. After the first of the year we’ll pick a weather window and head across the gulf stream and into the Bahamas for several months.