The end of March signals the end of the winter season for many boats, and the northwards migration is about to begin - TOMORROW!  The winds have been blowing hard for over a week, and the crews are ready to start moving.  The wind changed direction and started to ease yesterday, and continues to clock around this evening and into tomorrow.  The weather is looking pretty good for people to travel, and we've been busy saying good-bye to lots of folks.  It's about to be a ghost town around here, compared to the busy, happy chaos that's normal in season.  This is the dinghy dock for the Marathon City's mooring field on an average morning... dinks almost as far as the eye can see. 

It will be interesting to see what the City dink dock will look like after the Grand Exodus.

We're still waiting for the last items on the house to be finished, and we've been keeping very busy with projects.  Our dock neighbors give us a hard time because we're always working on various things, but it's a great opportunity to accomplish some projects while we're sitting still for a change.

We got a great deal on a waterproof computer monitor for the flying bridge, and the installation turned into a multi-day project for Jim.  All the wire chases are packed tight, and he had "fun" working all the wires down to the pilothouse and under the bridge... plus drilling holes, etc.

Our friend Larry (from ALGONQUIN) came over several times to get some help reassembling the fuel pumps for his generators.  It's a job that requires more hands than one human has, and he and Jim got pretty quick at the reassembly after doing it a few times!

In the meantime I've been working on some fiberglass projects - tackling a few small cracks and repair of one of the outside stair treads.  It's messy work - grinding, then sanding, then filling and fairing with epoxy and more sanding. 

I'm nearly finished with the repairs, and this week I'll start prepping all the areas for repainting.  I have touch-ups to do in each of the three colors on the boat (white, black, and tan on the decks), so that will probably take all week.  The paint is very fussy and I can't skip any steps in preparation, priming, and sanding.  It's not the most fun way to spend a day, but it's gratifying to improve my rudimentary skills and to tackle a big project that's a little scary.  Getting the repair to look cosmetically perfect is very challenging.

It's been too windy to kayak, but tomorrow looks good and I'm definitely going for a nice long paddle for a change.

We're conscious of the approach of spring as we see the sun marching steadily northwards - we have an unobstructed view of the sunset so it's something we notice every day.  A few snowbirds have left the marina to begin the northwards migration already, and a few eager folks think they're leaving for the Bahamas any day now - though the strong north winds say otherwise.  The divers are busy in the marina cleaning boats that will leave at the end of the month...  but the idea of staying on here a bit longer (to wait for the house to be completed) is nice.  We have tons of projects that we won't be able to finish even if we had all the time in the world, so we've been keeping uber-busy and hope we cross more jobs off the list than we add.  The weather is beautiful, and things will start to quiet down a bit.

On Mondays one of the marina guys works the length of the dock with the pump-out cart.  It's not a glamorous job, but it's not as bad as it sounds either.  Every boat has a holding tank for human waste, and Monday is the day to get the tank pumped out... an all-day affair for the fellow running the cart.  The cart has a motor that drives a vacuum pump (yes - the job sucks!) and fills the cart's tank.  Then he connects the hose to a dock fitting and pushes the contents into the main wastewater system... then on to the next boat.  In Paradise!

This has been one of those messy weeks.  Jim ordered new membranes for our watermaker, and he had to take a ton of stuff out of the lazarette (large storage area under the cockpit) just to get to the membrane vessels. 

The watermaker is a reverse osmosis system, and it uses a high pressure (800 psi) pump to push sea water through a membrane to produce potable fresh water.  The membranes are so fine that viruses and bacteria can not pass through.  The long tubes in the photo above are the pressure vessels that contain the membranes, and the photo below shows the old membranes (15 years old) and one of the new ones.

Jim also got the chest freezer up and running, after a little re-wiring.  He's still monitoring it, so all the crates and boxes from the freezer cabinet are piled on the floor.  We'll use that freezer for secondary storage, and only dig into it every few weeks to refill the main freezer.

To escape the mess, I took the kayak out to see my bird friends.  The tide was very low, and some abandoned lobster pots were visible.

I watched a beautiful snowy egret fishing in the shallows.  Egrets have black legs, but the snowy has bright yellow feet, which he shuffles to flush out prey.

Because we depend on the boat to provide us with safe, reliable transportation and all the comforts of home, we spend a lot of time doing maintenance on various systems.  We need to be self sufficient in remote places because parts and repairs can be impossible, difficult, or just very expensive... so we try to stay on top of things.  Remember that when we're cruising we are like a floating city - we have to supply all our own water, power, and handle waste - so those systems need care and attention as well.

Fortunately we like working on the boat - it's challenging, we're always learning, and it's gratifying to enjoy the fruits of a hard day's work.  In other words, we're not sitting around here sipping fru-fru drinks and working on our tans!

Yesterday was a good example of a typical day.  Jim was working on his own long project list, and I try to take care of simpler things so he can do the complex electrical and mechanical things that I'm not good at.  We were out of bread, and we make our own aboard - it's easy to run to the store here in Marathon, but not when we're cruising.  Bread takes up a lot of valuable space in the freezer, and the bulk of a bread machine is a small price to pay for the variety of fresh bread anytime we need it.  So, I got the bread machine fired up with some nice ricotta cheese bread...

Friends on GYPSIES IN THE PALACE found a little restaurant with a dock (if you eat at the restaurant the dock is free) in Marco Island, so we decided to give the place a try.  The dock is small - about 30' long, but we managed to secure the boat even though the bow is hanging out in space!  We had a chance to relax a little this afternoon, and were sighted by new DeFever friends (from Connecticut) in their 19' runabout. 

130 people and about 40 boats gathered around Cabbage Key and Useppa Island on the west coast of Florida for the annual DeFever Cruisers Rendezvous.  That's what boaters and cruisers do - they "rendezvous" any chance they get!  It's a great opportunity to share current information about cruising destinations, provisioning, technical issues (there are countless on a cruising boat), communications in remote places, etc.  It's also good to meet new DeFever owners and to see our long-time friends.

DeFevers are known for their high flared bows...

And here's part of the group who came for cocktails at Cabbage Key on Friday night...

We left Marathon on the 23rd, heading for the DeFever Rendezvous just north of Ft. Myers on the west coast of Florida.  On the way, we tucked into the Little Shark River in the Everglades for two nights to wait out a bit of weather.  We were traveling with our friends on GYPSIES IN THE PALACE, so we had a little company in an otherwise remote area.

The Little Shark River is a winding warren of thick mangroves and forest, with no signs of humans except for a few navigation markers here and there.  There is no cellular voice or data connectivity at all, which was kind of nice - it makes you focus on other things for a bit.  The River is full of wildlife - dolphins, sea turtles, snapping turtles (big ones!), pelicans, cormorants, herons, and white ibis. 

One evening we were sitting on the flying bridge aboard GYPSIES IN THE PALACE around sunset, and huge flocks of ibis flew past us, towards the Gulf - there were so many that you heard nothing but the soft whooshing sound of them all flapping their wings.  We wondered where all these ibis came from, so we put the dinghy ("Beastie") in the water to do some exploring.  Eventually we found their daytime hide-out, in the trees farther up the river.  They were everywhere!