After our return from the Bahamas somehow almost a month slipped by, as Velcro Beach is wont to do. We rented a car and drove down to Lauderdale to pick up our car from the storage unit. We sampled our favorite restaurants and a couple new ones.
I fixed the air conditioner a half dozen times, finally going through the whole system from end to end except a section of hose about two feet long. Of course that's where the real issue was. Some shells and such on the outside of the boat were broken up during bottom cleaning and sucked up by the water cooling pump. For some reason the design had two inch hoses contracted down three little inlet slits to the pump, which were almost completely sealed with shell fragments, with the the remaining pinholes filled with bits of sea grass. On one of the couple nights when the AC was out, we were attacked by those little black biting flies. They are small enough to even get through our screens. Heather as usual took the worst of it.
Heather had a quick trip home to Phoenix to help Chelsea and Travis. When I got back from the airport the boat next to us in the marina had sunk. A lightning strike a few weeks before had blasted some tiny little (undetected) holes in the hull, which over time progressed to larger holes. Yikes. Below are some of the local fauna, what passes for pigeons in Florida, the great American squirrel, and the other, other white meat.
I fixed the air conditioner a half dozen times, finally going through the whole system from end to end except a section of hose about two feet long. Of course that's where the real issue was. Some shells and such on the outside of the boat were broken up during bottom cleaning and sucked up by the water cooling pump. For some reason the design had two inch hoses contracted down three little inlet slits to the pump, which were almost completely sealed with shell fragments, with the the remaining pinholes filled with bits of sea grass. On one of the couple nights when the AC was out, we were attacked by those little black biting flies. They are small enough to even get through our screens. Heather as usual took the worst of it.
Heather had a quick trip home to Phoenix to help Chelsea and Travis. When I got back from the airport the boat next to us in the marina had sunk. A lightning strike a few weeks before had blasted some tiny little (undetected) holes in the hull, which over time progressed to larger holes. Yikes. Below are some of the local fauna, what passes for pigeons in Florida, the great American squirrel, and the other, other white meat.
The picture below is of posted instructions for acceptable behavior at my favorite donut shop in Vero. Three generations of a very nice family cranking out great donuts seven days. Words to live by.
Finally rested up we prepared to make our way north, returning the boat to Brunswick GA to hide out for hurricane season again. My right hand was still far from useful, but no longer sensitive to as little as a breeze. We were ready to go and I was up on the fore deck when something caught my eye. The dinghy was upside down on the deck forward of the mast for travel but something was different. What I realized after a few seconds was that the center seam of the floor had split at least a couple feet. This delayed our departure yet again and began the dinghy saga.
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