THE NEW YEAR BEGINS

I know it's been a long time since the last blog. I got so use to blogging as we made our destinations along the way, I almost forgot that we still have a lot to do and talk about now that we are settled in for a while. We had a wonderful Christmas and a busy couple weeks back home. We got to have an evening with our fellow cruisers from back home at our house. Steve and Nancy Janette of Katherine and Bill Sellars and Jeannie Mcavoy of Nemo joined us for cocktails and pizza to catch up on all of our adventures. Bill and Jeannie had helped Steve and Nancy take Katherine to it's new home in Texas. They had left the Chicago area in September and took the river route to Mobile and then over to Texas. You can follow their adventures at http://sailingkathryn.blogspot.com/. It was great hearing about all of their travels and sharing ours. We had a lot of business to take care of while we were at home but with the Holidays and all, we never seemed to have enough time to get it all done. We planned on driving our car down to Key West to make it more convenient to get around and to come home if necessary. This meant that we had to allow a few days of travel time along the way. All in all, even though we didn't get to see everyone over the Holiday, we got to see our children and granchildren and spend time with the people we love and miss the most. I only missed seeing my brothers and sister who live in Dyer but I'm sure we can make it up another time.

Denise and her beautiful Grandaughter Kaitlyn

My equally beautiful Granddaughter Lila with her new Uke. My other sister lives in Nashville, however, and that just happened to be on the way. So our first stop was in Music City. Although we got there late, we had a wonderful visit with Sandy and her rising star friend Megan Ellis. The next morning, we headed South with the next stop being as far into Florida as we could get. After a late check in at a cheap hotel, we made Key West the next day by mid afternoon. Our friend, Greg of Ocean Ministries met us and got us back to the boat before nightfall. The boat looked no worse for the wear, except for a disguting coating of guana (bird poop)sprayed across our bimini and dodger. We have mentioned cormarants in earlier blogs, but these birds are some of the nastiest and seem to love coating everything they can in between meals. This is our first experience with them using our boat for their resting place. Yuck! We settled in the next day and got ready to see what New Years Eve in Key West was like. There were lot's of people and lot's of drinking and we had the choice of watching the Conch Shell Drop at Sloppy Joe's or the Pirate Lady drop from the masts at the marina. The Conch Shell Drop was the choice. Needless to say, there were a lot of people in Key West on New Years Eve. We were able to stay out until the conch shell dropped and then made it back to the boat shortly afterwards. Welcome 2013! Now we get to settle in and explore Key West at a more leisurely pace. There is so much to see here, we keep adding things to our list almost every day. But, along with the exploring, comes a lot of work. The first order of business was to clean up the mess the cormarants left and to devise a way of keeping them off our boat. We had left some flags flying near the spreaders that we thought was working when we were on the boat. Apparently not. Our neighbors, R.L. and Karen on Last Call had a BB gun that certainly chased them away, but you had to be on the boat to shoot them. We finally hoisted the flags in front of the mast so that they sweeped the spreaders which works fairly well, unless there is no wind. There seems to be plenty of wind though, which creates some of our other challenges. In this large and rather open mooring field, the North and Northeast winds really kick up some pretty good sized waves. Our dingy has served us well in all other mooring and anchoring situations, but here, she is too small. To keep from getting soaked on our 15 to 20 minute ride to shore, we have resorted to wearing full rain gear. The other challenge is water. There is no place to get water except at the dingy dock, which cannot be accessed on our boat. This means we had to buy some 6 gallon water jugs and haul them to the dock in our already too small dingy. Each jug weighs about 50 pounds full and are extremely difficult to get back in the dingy, onto the boat and then having to hoist them to pour into our water tanks. The extra hundred pounds does nothing to help us get the dingy through the waves either! We have figured most of the problems out, however, and the longer we are here, the more we are enjoying Key West. In an effort to keep the blog short, (and hopefully interesting) and since I have not posted in so long, I will end this one and then try to post bits in pieces of our adventures (and more pictures) in chronological order from here.