Merry Christmas 2018

This is our fifth season in the South on Gran Vida, and other than one unfortunate trip home at Christmas for a sudden family funeral, we've spent every Christmas here in the South on the boat.  And I've never quite gotten used to it.  There is just something weird about listening to Christmas Carols while sitting in shorts in front of a cooling fan.

As usual, we were treated to a pyjama clad Christmas morning video chat with the grandkids as they opened their presents.  Such a cozy scene.  Hugs were shared through screens from fifteen hundred odd miles away.  With a fire crackling in the fireplace my daughter turned the camera to give us a glimpse of the wintery wonderland in her forested yard.  I so much wanted to be there and go for a walk in the woods after a morning playing with the kids.  I could almost hear that snow crunching under my feet.  Sometimes I miss winter so much.

As I'm sure is obvious, I battle homesickness this time of year.  We enjoyed phone calls and texts/emails with family and friends, all which helped to get me through.

It was a glorious, sunny day here in Florida and we ended the day with a dockside, pot-luck get-together in the warm sunshine with other boaters and lots of laughter and comaraderie. My attitude was quickly adjusted.  Perspective gained.

We have so much to be thankful for.....

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas 

and much peace, happiness and health in 2019.

Getting Stuff Done

We've been pluggin' away getting a few things done on the boat.  Jeff was busy down in the hole in the floor:  he installed two new batteries, tightened up some belts, changed some hoses, etc etc.

We replaced these old stained curtains, circa 1979, with....

...new blinds

 We completed some regular maintenance.
Here another coat of cetol is going on the bright work.

Provisioning is complete.  There is NO room on this boat for anything else.
  We have enough food/supplies on board to last three month...we hope!

We have about a week to go before we blast off so the pressure is on to get a few last minute jobs done.  I'm half way done sewing new drapes for the glass doors and Jeff's been buff and waxing a little bit each day.  Then some last minute organising, put the car in storage, and we're outta here!  Likely, we'll be heading East to await our weather window to cross to the Bahamas....  but one never knows for sure until we're doing it.

With Friends Like This....

Jeff's sore sternum is healing up nicely but as expected it's taking some time.  We've set aside six weeks for convalescence and we have two more weeks to go before, if all goes according to plan, we shove off from the dock.  We suspect that he has damaged his sternum somehow, but he never did get it X-rayed, arguing, vehemently sometimes, and against all logical advice, that there was nothing they could do but recommend rest.

Friendly Tip:  don't bother arguing with a Canadian of Scottish descent.  Holy hard-headed!

The heinous faucet that Jeff landed on, square on the chest.

It was very painful at first, especially when he coughed, and we were all concerned.  But four week in Jeff is getting up and about a bit more and getting some projects done on the boat.

With all the sensitive, caring friends around here, they somehow never seem to tire of gleefully reminding him to be careful!  Note the pics below:

Friendly reminder

Joining friends for a bloody mary fest on their flybridge.....

They had ALL the faucets on the dock covered with chairs...  just in case Jeff tripped again.  Jeez.

Some mysterious prankster covered the faucet outside our boat with an old life jacket

Nice that he's well enough that it doesn't hurt tooo much to laugh.

Six Mile Cyprus Slough

One of our favourite things to do is get up early in the morning and head out to one of the local nature refuges in the area, Jeff, with camera in hand and his big lens on.  Today it was Six Mile Cyprus Slough (pronounced "slew").

This area is actually a storm run-off area but they've given it back to mother nature.  It is very swampy and there are several natural ponds and an old quarry pit where two alligators are in residence, Big Al and Stubby.  Stubby got his name after a tangle with Big Al where his foot (paw?) was bitten off.  They now usually stay on opposite sides of the pit. Winding through it all is a several mile long boardwalk so one is always perched up above the swamp with great views.

We just love these nature areas, with their almost church-like feel, at least to us.  We find if we just sit quietly for a few minutes the place comes alive with birds, reptiles, various mammals...  once even pigs (although we hear they are escapees from a local farm).

Pileated Woodpecker

We chuckled when we learnt the name of this bird is the:
Immature Night Heron

Baby Copper Mouth Snake - highly poisonous.  We wondered where mom and dad were.

We wondered what all those pointy things were. 
We found out they are Cyprus knees - part of the root system of Cyprus trees.

The Skateboard Tragedy

We were chatting with a group of local boaters on the docks.  One of the children of a liveaboard family, a little eleven year old girl, went scooting by on her long board.  She shouted something cheeky to her mom as she was zooming past and her mom chuckled and taunted back that karma would get her for that.  We all had a laugh.

The guys.  Plotting their rescue.

Not ten seconds later that little cheeky monkey was back in tears.  She had lost control of her long board and into the water it went. (We were impressed with mom's abilities and took note not to ever cross her!)

Boaters quickly gathered, poking around with boat hooks etc, trying to find it.  It was in about six or seven feet of very murky river water.  No luck.

The next day a bunch of guys spent quite a bit of time strategizing and dragging anchors back and forth in the area it was last seen, trying to hook it.  The poor little girl was inconsolable.

Hooray!!!!

Eventually a diver who was in the marina cleaning boat bottoms volunteered to have a quick look. Mom explained that she couldn't afford to pay him.





It took about half an hour but he saved the day!  The little girl was delighted!  The guys plied him with free beer.

I just love a happy ending.

A Little Close for Comfort

We were walking the dock here at the marina one day just checking out the boats when we saw, right in the marina, a great big wonkin' gater.  He (or she) was just hanging out, eyeing us with steely eyes, right beside the very low dinghy dock.  It certainly didn't look too shy.  What a surprise that would have been for a dinghy pulling into the dock.  It must have been about ten feet long!

Wow!  Alligators are common on the rivers and they are usually shy and stick to themselves.  We see them sunning on the banks or floating in the river, but we've NEVER seen one in a marina before.  We wondered if someone was feeding it. (later, someone told me that a couple of dufusses were feeding it cheesies).

Later, while doing laundry, I noticed some action going on over by the local floating hair salon.
The salon is in a houseboat right here in the marina. The women were coming out the back door, with hair in various stages of "doing", snapping pics of a smaller gater, just floating there beside a piling, not five feet from the salon door.

So that is two of them.

The alligator catcher was called, a trap was set, but as of yet nothing has been caught.  Which is good news for the gators, as they would probably be destroyed being now comfortable around humans.

I'm hoping they got smart and went back out into the river where they belong.

Stuart Visit

 Yep, we're still here in Fort Myers.  Like I said before, if you're going to be laid up somewhere, this is a pretty sweet place to be.  We've got lots of friends here, there is always something going on, the weather has been good - vacillating between cold fronts (sweater weather) and heat waves (sitting in front of a fan).

Jeff's still pretty sore but he's moving around more and we're getting a few things done.

Grant, Cindy, Susan, Jeff

Grant turns the big six-Oh

We drove to Stuart on the East Coast to visit with friends Grant and Cindy (M/V As the Crow Flies) to help Grant celebrate his 60th birthday.  They had just received very bad news regarding their engine.  This, after just pouring a whole bunch of money into their boat for new tanks and various other repairs.  They were all provisioned and set to cross to the Bahamas with us when a little anti-freeze leak, on investigation, morphed into a whole other problem, requiring a new engine rebuild.  YIKES!!

We had intended to cross to the Bahamas with Grant and Cindy in early December but between Jeff's injuries and Grant and Cindy's mechanical problems, all plans have been rewritten.

This bad engine news arrived the day before Grant's 60th so that put a damper on the celebrations. There was no way we were going to let Grant celebrate his 60th without us.  It didn't take them long to shake it off and get with the birthday programme though. Things grew back into perspective and a great night was enjoyed, with lots of laughs and good cheer.

Mechanical problems and travel logistics will be sorted out.  The priorities of friendship, health and living life to the fullest quickly became the focus.

Plans in Pencil

The boating we do is relatively safe and we're pretty careful.  But stuff happens.  This time, poor Jeff had a couple of mishaps.  First, forgetting how that green film on the boat turns into very slippery slime when wet, he had a slip while washing the boat.  He bounced right back up and while bruised, kept on chugging.

dirty dirty dirty boat
This green/black soot is all over her after summer storage in the boat yard

Then, more seriously, a couple of days later on the dock, his foot caught on a raised section and sent him flying.  It probably would have been better if he landed in the water but instead he had an unfortunate rendezvous between a dock faucet and his chest.  Right dead center.  And hard.

Then thirdly, on the way to the head that night, groggy with sleep and pain meds, he tripped over a stepping stool that someone left out of place (hmmm, ok it was me) and took a nasty tumble hurting his shoulder.  So between his butt, chest and shoulder he's pretty sore.  We've extended our stay here in Fort Myers to let the captain have a little healing time.  Unfortunate, but as things go, not a bad place to be laid up.  Boating plans are in pencil.  We just go with the flow.

In the meantime, the boat has been cleaned and the provisioning is underway.  We've been enjoying catching up with old friends, local events in town - the monthly car show was on yesterday - and just relaxing on the boat.  We'll be here for a bit...  then who knows...

Car show in downtown Fort Myers

Great way to beat the heat....
An afternoon in an air conditioned pool hall
With Brian and Danielle (S/V Obewan)

Granvida in her slip at the Fort Myers Yacht Basin
where we've enjoyed many relaxing dinners in the cockpit at sunset.

Launch - Season 5 already??

Monday: Dinner with Susan's daughter and her family.  Tuesday: Dinner with Jeff's son in Eastern Ontario.  Wednesday: Cross the boarder and dinner with Jeff's daughter and her boyfriend in Virginia, Thursday: Dinner with Joe & Connie on their boat in St. Augustine.  Friday/Saturday: A visit to the Kennedy Space Centre.  Sunday:  Lunch with friends Cindy and Grant.  That's how our road trip to our boat progressed.  Awesome.  Hop, skip and jumping from family and friends.

Lunch with Grant and Cindy (M/V As the Crow Flies)

We squeezed in a visit to The Kennedy Space Centre, which was just so awe inspiring, from the miracles of engineering, to the reminders of the vastness of the universe and just how wee teeny tiny we are in it. We highly recommend it. It even made me teary-eyed with awe a few times (I'm a bit of a suck that way).

We did things a little differently with the boat launch this year.  Normally, we have the yard move the boat from the storage yard into the work yard so we can prepare it for habitation, paint the bottom etc.  This year, we thought what the heck.  The bottom didn't need to be painted and knowing that the boat would be nasty dirty, we skipped a step and launched right from the storage yard into the water, saving us a bunch of boat yard charges.  It was a little bit of a hard core move, but whatever.

We spent a quiet night at Glades dock, making sure nothing was leaking.  The next morning, over a peaceful coffee in the cockpit, we looked up and noticed a small gator, quietly gliding along in the morning mist.  Yep, we're back in central Florida!

We moved our very dirty and not-fit-for-habitation boat down the Caloosahatchee River to a marina in a lovely park (Franklin Lock Marina) and began the clean up.  It wasn't too bad of an experience - except for a few freak-out encounters with stow-away frogs - and it saved us a bunch of money, which we will justify by taking ourselves out for a nice meal or two sometime.

There always seems to be one of these guys floating
around when one stops on the Okeechobee

We'll spend a week or so in Fort Myers to finish the clean-up/organization and provision the boat.  From there...  we be boatin'

Summer 2018

We're beginning to feel a rhythm. Home/South/Home/South.  Being in virtual summer, for these two Canadians, we're starting to hardly get our seasons mixed up anymore.  We're learning just because it's hot and we're sitting here with fans blowing on us, it doesn't necessarily mean it's summer.  Winters, too, are now hot.  We're adjusting.

Back when we were traveling more we had a saying:  "Once we know our way around a city it's time to move on."  We're kind of feeling that way now about our half-looped lifestyle.  Thoughts of change are beginning to percolate.  There are murmurings that maybe winter at home couldn't be all THAT bad.  Could it?  Could it be time for a change??

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Summer of 2018 has come and gone.  Here's a recap:  We got some work done on the house.  Our Motor Home Airbnb was busy.  We got some family time in.  We bought and sold a couple of boats.  We took a trip to Newfoundland.

We got some work done on the good old house, replacing a double brick basement wall with a sturdy
2x6 insulated wall.  Much better and a good foundation to the next step, updating the kitchen,
which will be far more exciting (at least to me) 

Family visits!  So nice to spend time together.

The gargoyles and I enjoyed a camping trip in the Motor Home

My (Susan's) new boat.  She's a 22' aluminium replica "tug" that will get us out on the water
for daytrips and weekends,
and as she's trailerable, maybe a few extended trips.

We took a short trip to Newfoundland for a family reunion (Susan's).....

...and met (again) a whole bunch of cousins on my Mom's side....

 .....and learned a whole bunch of history on my Dad's side.  Here, Jeff and family members are taking
rubbings of the tombstones of my many-times-great-grandparents, who settled this little outport village
in Newfoundland a very long time ago.  Such a feeling of "groundedness". 

And...before we knew it it was autumn and the leaves were falling and it was
time to head back to the boat.