Monthly Archives: February 2013

We managed to get quite a few more errands done thanks again to our loaner car, some very helpful people and a little luck. We’re still far from the bottom of our to-do list but feeling a bit more accomplished.

This morning we visited the Charles Schwab office and opened a checking account after reading a ton of recommendations on cruising lists about no-ATM fees and no exchange-rate fees anywhere in the world. We’ve been getting dinged with ATM fees whenever we can’t find a branch of our current bank, so this will save us a little dough. Even if you get charged a fee by the host bank, Schwab will rebate the fees at the end of the month. Sounds like a good deal to us.

We found the battery monitor we want to install at a good price, checked out Bluewater Books and Charts again to see what we might want to pick up for our next cruising destinations, and visited Sailorman for the first time. This is another of the ubiquitous new/used/consignment shops that dot the Florida coastline and elsewhere. We rate it a C-minus; prices were pretty high, it was a little too organized to be fun, and there wasn’t the eye-popping size of Marine Connection Liquidators in Fort Pierce or the thrill of the hunt of Sailor’s Exchange in St. Augustine. I’m sure it’s just that the other places ended up having just what we were looking for, and Sailorman couldn’t tempt us with more than a couple of flag clips and a hose nozzle. At retail.

We had just enough time to get back to the boat and rustle up some Summer Salad Tacos to share with the other houseguests. Yes, our hosts are out of town and their place is crawling with freeloaders, all of us enjoying the Miami Beach lifestyle they work so hard for. We had a fun evening on Escape Velocity until the mice thought they ought to get back and put the big house back together before the cats came home. We’ll miss them. It’s always fun to cross paths with people via convoluted connections. Our circle widens and we love it.

We’re still waiting for one more crucial piece of mail that will allow us to get our Florida drivers licenses, and we really ought to see what official papers Izzy’s going to need for the next couple of months. Other than that, I have my list, Jack has his, and sooner or later we’ll escape from America.

We’ve been operating at about 50% power this week as we both recover from our colds. We took advantage of our loaner car to do a few errands that are difficult on bikes.

We also finally replaced the upper gasket on the freezer lid. I’m not sure how much we improved it, since our lid doesn’t really fit flush, but we’ll see how this works. And we still have to do the refrigerator gasket but that’s for another day.

Thursday we had a storm blow through with pounding rain and some unaccustomed wind. It’s weird to be tied to the dock because we don’t have the same protection from the weather that we do at anchor or on a mooring when the boat is always turned into the wind. This squall came from behind us so we had to retreat inside to stay dry.

We’ve been working hard to get EV scrubbed up and presentable again after so many months of cold weather and dirty anchoring. Jack spent a morning picking off the tiny flakes of metal that were leaving rust stains all over the foredeck from when he sawed off a length of anchor chain to send to Maxwell for evaluation. You think you’ve got it all and — whoops! — there’s another tiny rust dot. Looks like he got it all this time and the decks are looking clean and white again.

I’ve been spending a few hours a day consolidating our music collection onto one source and shunting it all onto our new iPod. Yesterday I plugged the iPod into the computer to do another transfer and the iPod promptly locked up. Nothing I did seem to have any effect, so I checked my Apple Store app and discovered a Genius Bar appointment available in about an hour. We jumped in the car and drove to Lincoln Road, an outdoor pedestrian mall on South Beach. After the genius revived our iPod we strolled the mall a little, soaking up the Miami Beach ambiance and a little Haagen-Dazs for our trouble.

This morning we enjoyed a Sunday breakfast of orange-pecan pancakes in the cockpit, and I’m awed again that this is our life now. We have chosen well.

University of Miami crew on a training run.

We get all of our bills and statements electronically but to establish residency I requested printed statements to be mailed to our official new address here in Florida. Easy, right? Wrong. This morning I learned that they were sent to our old house in Pittsburgh, which isn’t even our address of record any more and which we sold over a year ago. I sat on the phone with a human being and confirmed the correct address, which I had previously changed online. The bizarre thing is that one of the statements I requested came to the right place, the other didn’t. This is yet another holdup. I seethe.

Mr. Diesel Mechanic informed us today that he would not be able to shower our beasts with the love they require. Something something complicated something volvo something too hard. I really didn’t quite get what he was saying but I got the gist. So we’re back to square one on that.

Also, now that we have almost all the documents we need to become official Florida residents I jumped online to make appointments with the DMV for our driver’s licenses. The next available appointment is on March 11th. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!? The website says you’re required to get a Florida license within 30 days of moving here, but the appointments are more than 30 days away. I think we may have to rent a car and drive to a less populated corner of the state to get this done.

On the positive front, Jack is no longer bleeding and we’re both starting to see the backside of our colds. Tomorrow I hope to be able to knock some things off our very long list.

Any squeamish readers out there in Blogland need not read further.

This story begins with my dear brother who, for the purposes of this story, we’ll call Terry. It was a sunny Mother’s Day and Terry was cutting the front lawn with a push mower. It was the early 50’s, I was three and a half years old. I remember it like it was yesterday; no, I remember it better than yesterday. I was a precocious child and I’d decided that the stick I was playing with was too long by half so I reached over toward the spinning blades of the mower thinking how cool it would be to have my stick automatically halved by the mower. I’d had a lot of trouble with my sticks in the past because I wasn’t allowed to play with anything sharp. There is a lot of controversy, as one might expect, in my family about what happened next. Did I reach too far? Did Terry change direction or try to scare me? He was good at that. In an instant blood was everywhere, left thumb hanging by a thread. I ran into the house to show my poor mother what Terry had done to me. She promptly fainted. It wasn’t pretty. A neighbor heard all the commotion, ran into our house scooped up me and my recovering mom and, in the most frightening out of control car ride of my life, got us to Children’s Hospital in time to sew my left thumb back on, something that was brand new to medicine. Thanks, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The next story finds that person, Terry, inches from catching me as I run breakneck through the house towards my escape route, the basement stairs banister which I would routinely grab and swing under out into the basement floor, gaining me 3 or 4 steps on him. This time he is very close to catching me so I grab the banister higher than I ever have before. Ha, it worked again, but as I hit the floor running i notice a numbness and a tingling sensation in…you guessed it MY LEFT HAND.

Dear readers, no one should see that far inside their own body.

I ran up the stairs holding the open gash which was my left hand and of course my poor sainted mother who was the first on the scene promptly fainted and it was déjà vu all over again.

Years later, alone in a motel room, a slight miscalculation while cutting an apple with an ungodly sharp knife landed me in the hospital with a date and a team of hand specialists to repair the tendons in MY LEFT HAND!

Oh I could go on, with various cuts, slashes, and deep pokings, some requiring lengthy hospital stays. I suppose I should mention that I became a professional bass player with that left hand in spite of my propensity toward self mutilation.

Why burden you with my tale of woe?

This morning, while installing our new Iota 90 Amp battery charger with built in IQ4 featuring LED Indicators, I managed to gash my poor left thumb with the same knife that I used to do almost the same thing two years ago, while dry-walling the kitchen in our old house. That required 4 stitches to close but we sailors are made of tougher stuff.

My wife, sainted in so many ways, was not born with the nurse gene, and is as squeamish as it gets, much like my mother. When I calmly asked for a bandaid, ok a lot of bandaids, or a really big bandaid, she started hyperventilating and suggested a trip to the pros. In the end she managed to get a couple of butterfly closures on the gash before having to lie down for a while.

The bleeding seems to have stopped. Marce has recovered.

I had hoped that moving onto a boat would change my luck.

Yesterday our host and concierge Nancy gave us a lift to the Apple Store. We couldn’t get a genius appointment for all the things we need to deal with, but we figured we might be able to knock at least one thing off the list. The store is in an upscale mall, the likes of which we haven’t experienced in months.

The Apple girl who took care of us said this location at Aventura Mall is one of their flagship stores and it was more crowded than we’ve ever experienced.

Without an appointment we were afraid we’d have to wait for hours but we chose to just address a set of new earpods that weren’t working and we got them replaced in a short amount of time without having to wait for a genius. Nancy, meanwhile, hooked up with her next houseguest and they swung back to retrieve us at the Bloomingdales mall entrance. It was kind of a slow motion surgical strike.

Jeff was still at work when we got back to the house and we invited the women over for cocktail hour on Escape Velocity. Since we’re tied to the outpilings there’s no easy way to get from the dock to the boat. We’ve rigged a system whereby you board their boat from the dock, climb over to the swim platform, get into our dinghy which is tethered to both boats, then pull yourself over to EV. Never easy but always amusing.

This morning I awoke to the inevitable. I got Jack’s cold, despite my usual prevention methods of backbends, hydration and germ avoidance. I don’t feel too bad, but my energy level has dropped to about 1/4 tank. And there’s so much to do!

Today I’m staying aboard to run the watermaker and do some quiet computer business, or at least what I can without Internet access. Our friends have wifi but even though we’re right behind the house I can’t seem to get the boat connected. Jack took off to West Marine for a circuit breaker and to Walgreens for more DayQuil. Izzy and I are just going to chill here on a quiet Tuesday.

I’ve been able to do some yoga on the foredeck these last couple of days. It’s a good start to the day and should help me shake this cold quickly.

We’re tied up to the Sternbergers’ out-pilings for a few days. It’s great to be in a calm and safe place but being tied up is a different sensation from swinging at anchor or on a mooring. I keep waking up at every little squeak of a fender or tug of a dockline and I make Jack get up and go out on deck to make sure things are ok, which I don’t think he appreciates.

Sunday we joined Nancy and Jeff aboard Sea Note while they checked their crab traps. It was nice to enjoy the ride for a change, and being up on their flybridge gave us a new perspective on Escape Velocity.

Nancy and Jeff let us send some packages to their house, so we’ve got a new battery charger to be installed and a roll of sunscreen fabric to replace our saloon window covers. The new lighter color should help reduce the heat in the cabin. This fabric says it cuts 90% of the heat and light. We’ll be the judge of that just as soon as I get the covers made and installed.

We took advantage of the dock hose to give EV a good scrubbing, the first since Point Judith, Rhode Island, last August. She really needed it, and I think we only got half the dirt and salt off. We’ll give it another go in a day or two and maybe some waxing as well.

This morning we had a diesel mechanic take a look at our two beasts. They need a little love and we’d like to make sure they’re tiptop before we leave civilization.

We’re compiling a long list of parts and supplies we want to order, enjoying the sunshine and the easy company of good friends. We’ve got no complaints.