Up, over, through, under water - back home for Thanksgiving - sad boat update

Always around, over, through, or under ocean, river or stream

We met our good friends Radeen and Hayden for dinner at the Harbor Cove Marina Restaurant.  Since it was our last night, and we had lots of packing to do, they drove up from Stuart.  Thank you.

They are using Mack Sails to order many of their upgrades to their Island Packet 35, Island Spirit.  They are doing much of the work themselves. Impressive. DIY

   The Hinckley Boat Yard (like the boat maker in Maine) is a few miles upriver from Stuart and reputed to do good work.

The best thing we did before we left was to visit Heathcote Botanical Gardens in Fort Pierce.

This botanical garden has one of the largest outdoor bonsai exhibits in the USA.

 

Quite a few trees.

 

 

The herb garden

 

 

 

A Japanese garden

 

 

A greenhouse sales area

A butterfly garden with many flying around – yellow Julia, Monarchs,

A rain forest area with orchids.

Beautiful mosaic benches are placed throughout the garden.  I want one of these.  “You can make one.” Echoes in my ears.

 

 

 

For the next night a lights show throughout the garden was set up by volunteers; working hard to get ready.  Great idea to bring people to the garden in the “down” winter time of Florida.

For about 2 hours we ambled around all the different gardens.

Plumbago in front of the parked car.

 

citrus

 

 

Railing of sticks

 

 

Dwarf Buddha's Belly Bamboo 

Lots of good labeling.  To me, that's a sign of a good garden.

Friday: Back to the boat to pack the car.  We stayed in Palm Beach one night before using Palm Beach Airport to fly to Boston.  Fun to walk the beach and let Mazu run (too cold to swim.)

 ESA (Emotional Support Animal), Mazu, walked through the metal detector on her own and flew at our feet for 3 hours to Boston.  She was so good. Looking up from Drew’s feet.

 

 

Air views of the ocean we had just sailed.

 

Back to woodland walks, New England’s raw fall.  All the mallards were paired up even in the non-breeding season, swimming the Exeter River.

First snow in the back woods off of our deck.

BOAT NEWS

News and updates from Whiticar Boat Yard on Shawnee over the last 10 days has been spotty at best – the boat lift is broken so they can’t take the boat out to clean and paint the bottom,  repaint the boot stripe and do extensive work including refinishing the cabin teak floors.  They have given no estimates of the work they plan to do or will do while it’s in the water.   They have given no estimates of the time it will take.  We are waiting…

My evaluation of a good boat yard, and we’ve only experienced two, includes doing the work: 1) on time, 2) in budget, 3) everything works.  The two excellent boat yards are Maine Yacht Yard in Portland, Maine with Brian Harris, manager, and Zimmerman Boat Yard in Mathews, VA and Southport, NC owned by Steve Zimmerman.

We aren’t picking up Shawnee until after Jan. 20^th so we’ll see how it goes, and keep you posted.

Happy Holidays!!

 Our biggest present will be a new grandson in Bangor, Maine  - name undetermined, due Dec. 18.

Taking down sails day

We now start preparing the boat for its haul out on Thursday by Whiticar Boat Yard here in Fort Pierce.  Drew wants to see the gross bottom since it hasn't been taken out since August '15.  The bottom was cleaned regularly though it's been a while now. I'll get pix.

It's a rainy afternoon.  Nice to sit in the cockpit and write while snacking on popcorn, comfort food.  (Not really skinny girl - just small package.)

View from the cockpit.


 

Yesterday was a sunny, calm, perfect day for taking 3 sails down (jib, main and stay)  and wrapping them up.  No wind to blow them off the cabin top where we lay them out to fold, roll, tie, and push into the enormous sail bags.

We pulled down the main and wrestled with it to get it to fold.  It's not really cloth.  It's kind of a loud, plasticky material that doesn't fold easily.  They are dacron but very stiff, with a UV protective coating and a very tight weave to slow down deterioration.  Sail makers have special looms to create high strength and lightweight sails - similar to ripstop nylon.  With constant sun and flapping in the wind sail makers have constantly improved the fabric to reduce replacement of sails.  The first set lasted us until 2013.  They were extra strong and heavy. We replaced them after 14 years of use before our first trip south.



 

Sail folded on deck
 

We need to undo the super tight knots in the lines holding the sails.  They've been pulled tight by 800 to 2500 pounds of wind against the sails (Drew looked it up).  We found Dawn, once again, helps make this job much, much easier.  We soaked the knot in Dawn. [Someone should do an article on all the things Dawn can do.]  He also uses a rigging knife with a marlin spike to open it up.

It takes a while.

 The rigging knife has a marlin spike, a knife blade with a hole to make it easier to pull it out, and a shackle key to open shackles with, of course, a bottle opener - we know that's an essential part of almost any tool of this sort.




Here's the reason we're taking them down for repair -- the wear and tear from flogging, flapping, luffing, coming about, and jibbing as we sailed over the last 3 years.





Doing three sails takes almost the whole day. 

 
Folded and ready for the sail bag.

Drew is wearing a kerchief because the sweat was just dripping into his eyes continuously in the heat.

We rewarded ourselves with dinner at Harbor Cove Restaurant, the one we went to the first night here.  Live music is there nightly, and we danced.  Really busy, fun vibe from the hard working wait staff.  No mall walking here.  Great service from a group that like working here. Colorful, fun spot.

 

 

Then we ended the night sitting at the fire pit, sharing a glass of Tia Maria on ice.

 The three, silent, ever present screens at the bar showed a football game, a soccer game, and the 60 Minutes Trump interview with no captions.  We'll pick it up on cbs.com Monday night since our TV antenna is not picking up local CBS.
The Tia Maria and fire were a nice ending to a productive day.  We walked home in the light of the moon.




The day before the super moon: so named because it's the closest it's been to earth in 70 years; last time was 1946.
        ++++++                          +++++++++                      ++++++++++

Today, Monday, is cloudy, but before the rain I took advantage of the warmth, 80 degrees and went swimming in the triangular pool.  I swam about 12 little laps.  It was the first time that Mazu had seen me jump in a pool and swim.  She was sort of shocked and curious.  The pool doesn't have the greatest ambiance - pool with boats on one side and parked cars on the other - no trees.  The rest of the day I spent on work for the New Hampshire Master Gardeners Association and the Piscataqua Garden Club.

Drew walked up to the Whiticar Boat Yard Office in the pouring rain to have the important conversation about the long list of what we want them to do while we're gone.
I'm hanging here.

OH! For some reason the movie of Mazu at the beach came through.  She had such a good time and ran for about 20 minutes.  A happy dog : )

St Augustine to Fort Pierce, FL

A couple of pages are new at the top of the post, Passage Food that can help in planning. It's not a list for crossing the Atlantic, but we are outside for 3 or 4 days and it helps to have a base list for grab n go food when you're rocking and rolling.  Also a gardens to visit page with a list of relatively nearby gardens close to the coast.   Check out these two new pages under construction.  The list will definitely grow as I remember and add exemplary public botanical gardens. The other pages are organized and updated as we travel.

A few things that make St. Augustine a fun spot to visit.

The trolleys, and there are many of them, have drivers who tell the history of the city.  It is the city of lights at Christmas, the city of churches - Flagler wanted many denominations and had beautiful churches built or restored.  The town sort of has a European flare with fountains and spanish architecture.

Carriages carry people around the historic town.

My favorite coffee place right on the square.


 The Fort plan and it's shape today.  It was actively manned as a fort through the second world war.  It became a tourist site about 1945.

 Sleeping quarters

The fort is one of the sites right on the inlet used to protect the city from the French and British capture from 1565.  It is a National Park so the rangers speak at programs throughout the day.  This fort is one the oldest standing because it was built of coquina, a mixture of shells and calcium that over the years of settling create a special kind of rock.  They were cut into squares to build the walls.   This material could withstand cannon balls because it absorbed the shock and did not fall away nor crash through.

Inside the courtyard.

One selfie.

In conjunction with favorable wind, tide and current we left about 8:30 am.  I was at the helm as I started to back out.  The current was so strong it pinned us against the dock.  I couldn't move.  All the lines were off of the dock and posts and I couldn't move.  With turns and bow thruster slowly we motored out of the slip without hitting any boats.  But it was close.  We waited a few minutes for the 9 am opening of the bridge and headed out.

It was very rocky out of the inlet because the wind was going against an outgoing tide and current lifting up the whitcapped waves.  I with my transderm patch behind my ear continue to have absolutely no seasickness.  We put up the jib in a nice northeast wind about 12 k and settled in with the auto pilot to follow the course.

Here is the lighthouse on Amelia Island just as we turn south for Fort Pierce, a 30 hour ride at 6k.  Again we planned the hours in order to arrive at the Fort Pierce Inlet with an
in -going tide and current.

You can see the swells and whitecaps.

Here's our Navionics route south for about 165 miles - the white circles.  The red was the showing the current at about 2 k going into the Fort Pierce Inlet.  The bottom shows the ebb and flow of the tides and where we are in the cycle.  Another indicator that we are headed south is the sea temperature.  It went from 71 to 77 degrees in 30 hours.  Nice.

As the sunset here is one of many fishing boats we passed going south.  These fishing boats have flocks of sea birds following them.  We watched flocks of pelicans sitting on the water.  Never seen so many at once. (but not in this picture.)

Strange picture but it is the moon on the jib sheet in the middle of the night.

It's amazing to watch the constellations like Orion start out in the east after sunset  and move over 8 hours to the west though the night.  With a close to full moon fewer constellations are visible.  Then the glow of the sun before it is over the eastern horizon.

Coming in the Fort Pierce Inlet with a rocky breakwater to block the northwind waves on the north side.  See the colorful umbrellas.  Temperature is 75. Lots of Florida sunshine.

The other side of the inlet.  Nice silhouetted palms.

For the first time ever a rigid inflatable Coast Guard boat came up along side in the middle of the inlet, Drew at the helm, me just watching the buoys.  Drew slowed right down.  Many boaters had told us of how they had been boarded and answered their questions.  Boat to boat they asked us where we came from, where are we headed, and how many were on board.  They never boarded us.  Very courteous and that was it.
  We continued into the protected waterway and motored into Harbortown Marina, nicely protected from wind and wakes behind these mangroves.

 View from our table at the marina restaurant.  We had conk fritters, peel and eat shrimp, seared tuna spring roll and artichoke hearts filled with crab.  sooo good.

Lots more pelicans down here.  Hadn't seen one until we got this far south.

Mazu at my feet at the restaurant, patient girl.

b

One of the better pictures I've taken.


THE NEXT DAY, Saturday
We slept til 8:30 and then did the usual chores, find the dog park, walk the dog, hose down the boat from all the salt of the trip, inside the pulleys, the in-mast furling gear, etc.

And then,  we, yes we, took a really long walk from the Marina to the beach, 6 miles round trip and here's what we saw:

Man throwing fishing net into the water.

 At the beach and Mazu loved it.  Wish the long video of her tearing in and out of the waves could download here.  So happy to run free.

On the way back we heard music floating in the air, drank margaritas at this great watering hole, Mazu along,  A good band that plays 2-5 PM, close harmony blue grass and country.  At Little Jim's Bait and Tackle --Mostly beer, wine served and a crowd appreciative of well played music.

This bait shop is very near the US Navy Seals Museum.  The wall was full of Navy Seal signs.

No colorful sunset tonight.  We went home to read, do this blog, fix my phone so the pictures would send to my computer.  That's why the blog was delayed: 30 hours sailing outside, and the glitches getting all these pictures downloaded.  If we had followed the ICW waterway it would have taken us 5 days and no sail.

Tomorrow we explore the town.  Really want to show a nearby Heathcote Botanical garden.  https://www.heathcotebotanicalgardens.org/

Next Friday we leave with Mazu on the plane for Boston, leaving the boat with a long "fix this" list for Whiticar Boat Works for 2 months.

All in all everything is working pretty well.  Tomorrow we will take down the jib because we can see it needs resewing.  When coming about, running the jib through the slot without the stay sail up causes it to get stuck and pull on a stay -- thus it became frayed and ragged.

 I am hoping to go swimming in the ocean.  There is a triangular pool here - we'll see.