A Domestic/Chore Day

Day 9:  April 3, 2014

We awoke a bit early this morning.  The wind blew fairly hard most of the night and the lines on the mast slapped, making an annoying rhythmic sound.  So, sleeping wasn’t the best.  We felt secure in the fact that our anchor was well embedded in “good holding ground” so Second Wind stayed put.

Breakfast was again sausage gravy and tortilla.  We are trying to eat our ground meats first before be begin to treat ourselves to the good cuts of meat.  I think we have two or three more gravy days left before we head for the Cheerios. 

West Palm Beach is a Beautiful City

After breakfast, I finished the previous day’s blog and again called the Raymarine folks.  This time I reached a human in about 30 minutes and the fix came out in about 15 seconds.  It turns out that you can only have one compass in the system, so all we had to do was remove the compass from the compass gauge and the gauge would then read the headings that were produced by the tiller pilot.  The fix took 2 minutes. 

We had run a tank of fuel dry and our ice was down to a baseball size block so we loaded up Damn Dink with the empty tank, two grocery bags of trash, our passports and camera and headed across the ICW to the Palm Harbor Marina.  The wind was blowing from the south and the tide was rolling toward the south so the chop was enough to give us several good splashes of cold salt water.  This Marina is one that advertises that they have 200 slips for boats up to 150 feet so our 8 ft Dink felt very much overwhelmed. 

This stately lady passed our anchorage

We pulled up to their fuel dock and I walked down 100 yards of dock to the fancy office to request a bag of ice and 5 gallons of fuel.  This office had a few high end supplies and sailing accessories along with a huge selection of pricey wine and cigars.  The boats that were tied up in the finger docks were all of the biggies that I have been ogling over since we came in the area.  They sent a young man in a 4 passenger golf cart to fill our tank.  He had a bit of trouble getting his high volume pump to keep from blasting gasoline all over his dock as he filled our tank.  He was a nice young kid who was a professional dock worker.  He works on this dock in the winter season and goes to a dock in St. Michaels in the Chesapeake in the summer.  He hauled Janine and me down millionaires’ row of boats back to the office to settle up.  We passed one power cruiser that was probably 40 feet long, nothing overly fancy, mind you, that had an asking price tag of $3,250,000

Another view from our anchorage

hanging on the back. 

We headed back to Second Wind  and unloaded our ice and fuel then headed back to the beautiful public docks where we tied up the Dink and hailed a taxi for a trip to the Customs and Immigration to report that we were leaving the countr.  After a $26.00 trip to the fed office, we were told that we had to go to the Customs office at the Port of Palm Beach.  Our willing cabbie had waited for us and took us to the next establishment.  We asked him to again wait and obviously he was willing. 



On the second floor of this huge building we came to a small room in which 15 folks were crammed waiting to talk to the guy who had “just left the window!”  One of the immigrants standing in the line outside of the door told us that it would probably be an hour before we saw “the man behind the window!”  Meanwhile, another couple who had a neat dog came into the line behind us and seeing the backup decided to come back at a later time. Janine stayed in line while I went to send the cabbie off.  I rode the elevator with the recently arrived couple.  They were just returning from a 2 month trip to the Abacos in the  Bahamas.  They told me that what I needed to have was a sticker on the boat and that I could get it online.  They said that all that was really needed was to have the number on that sticker and we would be allowed easy entry.  They told us to send the cabbie on and they would drive us back to the park where our Dink was

And another

moored.  They were really interesting folks who had spent the past 30 years married and working on boats around the world.  The cab ride ended up costing $43.00.  In Perry County Ohio that fee would have taken you all the way across the state and back.  Well maybe not.

They dropped us off at a Publix grocery and we picked up some supplies. 

We then walked back to the dinghy dock and made the splashy ride back to Second Wind where we put away our treasures, fixed lunch and decided that the afternoon would be a resting/reading down time.  I went online and registered with Customs to get my “sticker” and when I finally got to the place where I tell them what level sticker I was attempting to buy, I found that the “stickers” apply only to boats over 30 feet in length. SO I DON’T NEED A “STICKER!”

Fine Dining aboard Second Wind

And brats and scampi pasta for dinner and bed around nine.