Another day in the Florida life...

Yesterday was great.  Regular exercise has been a problem on the boat.  I have the paddleboard now which helps.  I take walks, but it’s really not enough.  So yesterday at dusk Drew rowed the new dinghy with Mazu aboard while I paddled next to him.  I fell in again just at the end and climbed back aboard.  Can’t take a selfie of us while paddling.  It was fun.  Earlier pic when I did have Mazu aboard.

Here's a duck we can't identify.  Waddled along alone.

Projects have been delayed, on the list is: change the oil (every 250 engine hours), replace the macerator pump, replace the broken bow light, refill the propane tank for the stove, replace the window shades with plastic translucent ones for privacy since we’re on a dock, mount the new TV, learn my Go Pro Camera to put on the paddle board.  It’s February and Drew seems to hibernate even in the sunny, warm, Florida weather, sleeping late many mornings.

Picture this:  The Fairchild Botanical Garden Glass House dining room overlooking the butterfly garden with some as big as birds, sun-gilded flecks of blue, white, yellow against the greenery; a Dale Chihuley gold and white blown glass chandelier glimmering, shimmering overhead, fresh orchids on every table, no crowd; holding hands while listening to the Frost Music School clarinet, bassoon, and flute trio play Bozza, a 1900 French composer and an upbeat Beethoven string piece they played with their wind instruments.    

A truly wonderful afternoon.  We walked all through the botanical garden, the rainforest orchid walk, past a cannonball tree and a great 14” pink trumpet flower hanging off bushes, around the cycad (oldest plants still living on earth) circle and overall watching an emerging flowering spring.  We ended at the store where I looked at a selection of exquisite botanical print notecards of Gaugin, Monet and Chinese prints. Next to me a woman turned and said, “Isn’t this place just magical?”  It certainly is. 

This was the precursor to watching the Super Bowl Sunday at Monty’s Bar with a friend whose dinghy flipped that morning with him in it on his way in because of high winds. 

 He was helped by fellows in the mooring field to right it, and bail it out.  He took the shuttle to us and we were to take him back to his catamaran in our dinghy after the game.  Instead he slept on our boat for the night with the heat turned on. We were reminded how happy we are to be in a slip in spite of the cost.  A pretty constant wind of 15 to 20 K is blowing here.   There is the occasional calm day.  The protected (by mangrove islands) waters in the dock area allow me to paddle around.  In the mooring field we’d be marooned on our boat every day.  The marina shuttle boat to and from land doesn’t run if the wind is too high.

Last but not least (as books are the best part) is the book for seafarers I must recommend, Incredible Tales of the Sea. It includes excerpts from famous authors’ books like Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island  at the critical moment when Long John Silver finds the treasure spot with young Jim only to see an empty hole then to battle the mutinous crew who had trudged to the treasure spot first.  Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe  describes a scary sail around his island on his island made boat that almost takes him out to sea with no supplies.  Victor Hugo in “An Imprisoned Thunderstorm” describes a terrible lose cannon on a ship.  As it rolls wildly around the cannon hold it kills several men.  But one brave soul climbs the ladder below and in slow motion words Defoe explains how it is captured…white-knuckle reading.  Jules Verne in “An Unknown Species of Whale” describes Captain Farragut on board the Abraham Lincoln frigate out to capture a narwhal that ends up to be something else - a science fiction piece.  Dickens’s “The Wreck of the Golden Mary” describes in tearful prose two lifeboats' long survival adventure after the ship goes down.  Another includes the sentence, “A joke is always like an outstretched hand.” in a story by John Traust.

Oh, the power of story can bring you right there.

I quote, “But these thoughts and kindred dubious ones flitting across his mind were suddenly replaced by an intuitional surmise which though as yet obscure in form, served practically to affect his reception of the ill tidings.” by Herman Melville in “A Fatal Mistake” from Billy Budd.  -- Yeah, you have to read it again.  The old fashioned long terribly descriptive sentences of an “intuitional surmise”.  Have a student read a sentence like that and tell you what it means.

Have a good day.  Be kind.  Fair winds.