Shell Point Marina

From the minute we were towed into Shell Point Marina (which has a Ruskin, FL address), the day after the election, we felt welcome. Tim, the manager of the marina, was very helpful and we were able to breathe a sigh of relief that we were not leaking water into the bilge and that we were tied up to the dock. Finally, some time to relax and quit worrying. All the work that we need to get done on the boat can be done there at the marina.

Tied up two slips away was the yacht Katapoul and two of the kindest souls you’ll have the blessing to run into – Jo and Paul. Both young army veterans, they were busy below decks on the boat that they had just bought getting the boat ready for a trip around the world. They sold nearly all that they owned in Missouri, bought their boat in Naples, FL and moved it to Shell Point to do some work on it before they head out on their adventure. They arrived every morning early and worked all day, stopping occasionally to chat with us and to share their dreams. I envy them! They are the dreams I had as a young man their age. Instead of children, they will have two dogs and a bird as their mates on the voyage. Both Jo and Paul were more than willing to share their knowledge of all sorts of boat things with us. They were very helpful to us and we appreciate it very much.

Jo and Paul's boat

I had an e-mail from Paul a day or so ago and he said that they are ready to move aboard the boat and hope that they will be able to get away from the dock by December 19, headed to the Bahamas. They will be sending e-mail updates as they voyage along and I shall pass along the updates.

Our flight back from Tampa was scheduled for early morning the Saturday after the election and we will be forever thankful for the ride that Jo and Paul gave us to the Tampa airport on Friday night after we had shared a great dinner at a local seafood restaurant. THANKS, Jo and Paul!!!

The time we spent at the dock at Shell Point before we flew back to Albuquerque was time spent lazing about for a bit and some activity sorting out the lines and equipment that filled nearly every space aboard the Eye Quit. Some of the stuff was beyond further use and we filled garbage cans with it. Some things just needed to be cleaned up, which we worked hard at and then got packed back aboard..

A mother pelican and her brood on the floating dock next to our dock.

We were sorry to have to lock up the Eye Quit on Friday evening and head for the airport. It broke our hearts to leave her there, knowing that we could not be back until some time in January.

Hopefully, we will move the boat south to the Keys and her home in the Community Harbor in Tavernier by the end of January. Jo and Paul promised to keep an eye on Eye Quit until they left. The small solar panel we installed keeps a trickle of charge going into the batteries, which power the bilge pump. All seems to be working! So far we have not gotten a frantic call telling us that Eye Quit has suddenly started taking on water.

I will soon be sending e-mails to both Tim and Mike to arrange the work that needs to be done as they haul Eye Quit out of the water.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

Things to be thankful for:

A crazy sense of humor.





That this guy is history, literally as they will be talking for centuries about how he messed things up!



That Obama will be in office soon, and really not a moment too soon!



That we have such wonderful friends and family, here are some of them!!

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!!!!!

JWs take on election day and some positivity.

Election day starts with my call to the Shell Point Marina in Ruskin, FL at the hour shown on their website as the time they opened and spoke to the person who saved our ass. What a blessing it was to meet Tim Dickson, the manager of the marina. I explained all that a I could about our dilemma and the past 48 hours and what we were trying to arrange to get the boat trucked to Tavernier and inquired as to how we might get the boat to his marina to get it hauled out of the water.

He asked, “why are you going to all that trouble? Why don’t you just get the boat towed over here and just leave it here till the work can be done on the prop and the bottom. We do that work and I can find you someone to tow the boat over here. Its way less expensive than trying to do that work and then truck the boat to Tavernier.” Could everyone hear that sigh of relief that morning? I know that it was deafening where I stood and it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders.

I talked to Mike, the fellow that Tim pointed me to for the towing. That turned out to be relatively inexpensive and it turned out that Mike’s business did much of what we needed done to Eye Quit and he worked almost exclusively out of Shell Point. We made arrangements to have the boat towed the following day since Mike was minding his son who was feeling out of sorts and couldn’t go to school and right on the second he had promised, Mike came around the corner in his boat, ready to haul us over to the Marina.

I had already gotten the lines to the shore ready to let go and it wasn’t long before Eye Quit’s bow was tethered to Mike’s boat and we were headed down the canal toward Tampa Bay and the two hour tow over to the marina. I was paying attention to Mike’s hand gestures about how he wanted me to steer Eye Quit as we went around the corner at the end of Benny’s canal and I am glad that I wasn’t looking back. Lara told me after we had rounded the corner that Benny had watched us all the way down the canal and around the corner; I suppose not wanting to let go of his precious friend.

Now she was really ours. The tow over to Shell Point was calm and uneventful. We pulled in the marina and Tim had lines ready to throw to us and he pulled us backward into the slip that Eye Quit is going to inhabit for the next couple of months. More about our stay in the marina in my next post.

"Eye Quit"'s new home away from home:

Election day!!!

Election day!!!

It is cool and overcast in Apollo Beach as election day dawns. Bean has left and with him the vehicle. We are in a cul de sac with no transportation to coffee and no alcohol in our stove (plenty for me though, I can’t believe I am not drunk yet) to make coffee.

Not a great start. I am beginning to feel like Eyeore. The saving grace is a good nights sleep, after getting back to the boat at midnight,compared to the night before and “bilge pump watch”. Now that we are not worried about her sinking we are back to being infatuated with the peace of sleeping on water.

The only real contact with the outside world we have is a crank radio. It is Apollo Beach so the only news radio we can find is right wing. It is election day so we suck it up. Bill o’fuckme Riley. Seriously. But hey! Turn that frown upside down because we are going to win this one. We get to listen to the frustration in their voices and the beginnings of the suck up fest. “Obama is a smart guy” etc.

JW expressing himself on election day.

My awesome "Grateful for Obama" pin that a really nice kid gave me at a festival. While his friends were partying he was working the campaign. It is kids like him that gave us such a great outcome this election! Thank you young Democrat from Minnesota, good work!!!

We don our election apparel and noodle around the boat waiting for the Marina to open so we can get some answers to the other big questions in our life.

“Who will be president?”,

“Will we go completely broke having our boat trucked down the interstate?”,

“Will our prop EVER come off?”,

“Where will our boat wind up?”,

“Will JW survive a day with me without coffee?”

Here comes the sun!

JW made the phone calls and people went to the polls. Today was to be a day of change all around! JW will fill you in on the details but the first good thing that happened was that our faith in the kind of people who work with cruisers and boat people was once again reinforced. With their patience and kindness our dream was restored. We couldn't do anything on election day because the Captain that agreed to tow "Eye Quit" had a sick child that day and couldn't tow us until the next morning. But we were no longer on the edge of financial ruin and our boat had a temporary home.

So with a game plan forged we settled in to listen to election results in Florida. I am very much a politico, i read Huffpo every day and had watched Oberman and Maddow like they were prognosticators of doom or triumph.

JW woke me up every morning for a month with news of the state-by-state battles from several online political maps. After the fiasco of 2000 and the heartbreak of 2004 we could not fathom another Republican victory. One of the reasons a boat was so compelling to me was the idea that if we had to we could sail out of the US on a moments notice.

Pretty drastic you might think but I had blood in the game as they say after 2000. My wonderful but rebellious son joined the Army early in 2004. How do you rebel against a hippy mom? Go to war. By the end of 2004 he knew he had placed himself in the middle of a war which was unjust. He knew that he had been lied to by his government. He helped me canvass for Kerry.

He was also deployed to Afghanistan twice and Iraq and awarded two bronze stars and a purple heart for his valor and effort.

This is Dylan before the Army with JW:

This is Dylan in Iraq:

We finally got him back. Not necessarily as good as new but we are trying.

Dylan and Bean

Camping the Keithley way.

Our version of a family reunion.

So this election was very important to us. We thought we were going to be at sea on our boat with our good friend Bean. Instead we were sitting in our boat still tied to the dock. The wind was chilly and the day was cloudy but the sun was coming. We listened to the local Republican commentators on our crank radio. They were outraged that there were problems at the polls. Ain’t Karma a bitch?

That evening we trekked two miles to the Circle Bar and Grill with the laptop to view the election results and have dinner and cocktails for me!

The place closed at Nine but by then it was pretty clear what was going to happen. I think Apollo Beach was shocked that Florida went for Obama but they were ecstatic i am sure to find that prop two had passed. I am still scratching my head as to why the government should get involved in this. The only reason I have ever heard is religious and we know the government isn’t supposed to act on that. Hmmmmmm…..right.

We had a delicious meal and a good walk to and from and we were exhausted. The night had turned balmy and clear. We crawled into the V berth with our crank radio and fell asleep. I awoke a couple of hours later and heard Obama giving his victory speech. I was cuddled up on the water with JW and Obama was our president elect. Content and relieved about so many things, I fell back to sleep.

Another view on the trip to Tavernier

It really became apparent on Sunday that we were not going to get the prop changed out, the bottom cleaned sufficiently and the engine working in time to either motor Eye Quit down the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) or to sail her the full way to Tavernier and then get back to Tampa in time to catch the airplane back to Albuquerque the following Saturday. With the marinas closed on Sundays and Mondays, nothing was going to happen till at least Tuesday.

I saw Benny sitting out on his screened in patio, watching our activity onboard the boat and decided that I needed to talk to him about the possibility of leaving the boat right here at his dock till we came back down in January. I knew that he was anxious to sell his house and to move into a managed care facility sort of equidistant geographically between his daughter and his son in the Tampa area. I also knew that he had not yet talked to a real estate agent and that there were seemingly dozens of homes for sale in his subdivision. All this in the worst real estate market, the worst economic times I have seen in my lifetime. So, I had hoped that he might want a little extra money that I was willing to pay him for the right to leave the boat there.

When we went down to take possession of the boat, it was already our intention to come back to Florida in mid-January and spend a couple of weeks aboard the boat in Tavernier. It looked like we were going to have to get the boat down there in January, instead of on this trip.

I approached Benny and put on my most needy face and asked him if we could leave the boat there at his dock until January and his immediate and only response was “no”. He didn’t owe me an explanation, but I was puzzled. What the hell am I going to do with this boat now. I had called a couple of marinas in the Tampa area and misunderstood the likely cost of keeping the boat in their marina as nearly $1000 per month. I couldn’t afford two or three months of that before getting to Tavernier.

With this in mind, we headed off on Monday morning in Bradley’s car to Tavernier. I was coming to the conclusion that I was going to have to find a shipping company that would truck the boat the roughly 150 miles south. Lara’s description of the trip to Tavernier and the wonders that we found there is right on. My mission, while she helped Bradley, was to find a way to get the boat trucked to Tavernier. I stopped at a boat yard that had space for Eye Quit if I could get her there and the monthly rental was very reasonable. Further, the kind soul at that yard who spent the time with me thinking out this process gave me some other advice. He pointed me to www.uship.com, where you can arrange to have all sorts of things shipped, nearly anywhere you want. The electronic age has come to the independent over the road truckers who fire up their computers while in truck stops and search out loads to haul on their way home.

I placed an ad on uship.com and hoped that by the time we got back to Apollo Beach that I might have an answer. It was amazing! Before we even left Tavernier we were getting e-mail responses to my ad. It looked like it was going to cost us about $1500 to have the boat shipped south, in addition to the cost of towing it to the marina and the cost of having the boat hauled out of the water and placed on the flatbed truck. All in all, another $2000 I hadn’t planned to spend. Call me naïve or what!!!

The car trip back to Apollo Beach was uneventful. By the time we were back aboard the boat, we had been gone for nearly 20 hours and we were all exhausted. We crashed into the bunks and Bradley got the sleep he needed for his drive back to Terre Haute. The next morning, election day, Bradley pulled away in his car and I waited for the appointed hour to call the nearby marina (approximately 4 miles away as the crow flies).

Tavernier

Tavernier

Bradley (called Bean by me for years) has been on the hook in the Tavernier community marina for at least 8 years. As he drives into the Marina, the restaurant he works at occasionally delivering pizzas, the courthouse, the boat store, every where, people know him and welcome him home.

This is sad because Bean has been gone for about four months taking care of his mother and he thought he would be able to be back in Tavernier for awhile but instead he has to take care of business and leave that day.

The game plan is to go to Tavernier, help Bean get his shit done and book back to Apollo Beach, where Bean will drop us off and continue his drive back to Terre Haute.

Major bummer all around!!! Instead of being able to sail into the harbor on our boat, we are driving there on the Interstate. Instead of getting a couple of days R and R we are scrambling to get all of the things Bean needs to accomplish done in less than a day. We are all sad and feel a bit defeated. Bean comments to me that between the two of us he has never seen such bad luck. We are stuck in a vortex, we decide.

Finally, completely frustrated Bean comments to me “Damn Lara, you’re the freakin Goddess, can’t you DO something?????”

This gives me pause, so on the way to Tavernier I focus my energy on Bean and smooth sailing, so to speak. Initially it seems to have limited effect.

We go to get Bean’s outboard out of storage at the place he had it repaired. Because he has been gone so long they are charging him storage. Its closed. Crap!

We go over to his storage place so he can pay his bill. No one is there. Crap!

We go over to the actual Community Harbor Marina so Bean can check on his boat and JW can talk to them about hauling our boat out or accepting her in the Yard if we have to have her hauled down the interstate from Apollo Beach. (We still don’t know what the hell is going to happen because the marinas in Apollo Beach and Tampa Bay are closed on Sundays and Mondays.) The hell?

They tell us their yard is full, we have to look elsewhere. Triple Crap!

We go over to Bean’s storage facility again and there is a foreign padlock on it. Shit!

Everything just sucked! So, we decide to go take showers at the marina and go to lunch.


Bean with his trusty hooka in happier times.

Then things started to turn around a bit. I decided in my Goddessy way to declare the trip to Tavernier a “fact finding mission”. I tell JW that we should be taking it all in and at least now we know where we are going to be living. Our mood lifts, a little.

The positives start to happen. They have probably been happening somewhere in this adventure to someone but the three of us have been in such a funk that a rainbow shooting out of one of our asses could have gone un-noticed.

The marina is clean as a whistle. I go over to the pier and watch a couple of green fish with bright blue strips chase a needle fish. You can see the urchins and star fish on the bottom. The water is clear and clean.

The showers have hot water on demand and you could literally eat off the floors. The facilities are crisp and modern. I have seen worse bathrooms in some luxury gyms I worked at.

There is a free stuff table, and a take a book leave a book shelf. I am a sucker for taking and leaving a book. When we come back I think, I will bring a stack of books! My mood is lightening. They have wifi at the tiki hut and fans to run off the noseums. Those little bastards!

Next we go across the street from the Marina to a Cuban restaurant. JW and I split a wonderful Cuban sandwich and some delicious Cuban coffee. They also sell beer. I can actually crack a smile at this point.

The town is nice and friendly with many conveniences and a great bike path all through it. I go with Bean to the Courthouse so he can vote while JW talks to a guy at a different boat yard down the street. Brad is going to vote absentee. He is a bit worried that they won’t let him the day before election day. He can vote! He is very relieved. We all want our voices heard this day and especially in Florida that notorious state.

The boat yard guy is from New Mexico! Yay! He is kind, will let us do the bottom work ourselves if we want to and the price is reasonable. He is eager to help us and is compassionate about our story. JW stands straighter as some of the weight he has been carrying around on his shoulders disappears.

Next we go back to the place that is repairing Bean's motor. They are back and the gates are open. Now Bean is smiling a bit more, until he gets the bill that is.

We go next to Islamorada where Bean works off and on delivering pizzas. The people there are really nice and the pizza is good. The owner Jose tells me that they have a Mexican day and the place is packed. We discuss green chile and criminal defense. He tells me that I could have some clients in the area because there aren’t that many criminal defense lawyers in the Keys. Really? I figured the place would be packed with them. Lousy with pirates and criminal defense lawyers is what I was thinking.

We meet a number of Beans friends and start to feel very comfortable with Tavernier but the sun is starting to set and Bean’s errands have all been run (what with a nasty gram to the storage people and a hack saw that they agreed should be used on the foreign lock which was placed on Bean’s storage space due to a clerical error, people are so laid back in the Keys). It’s time to return to Apollo Beach. We make the six hour trek back, mostly in silence. I feel so very sorry that Bean can’t stay here on his beloved boat and that we won’t be staying here on ours either. JW and I have a million decisions to make and questions that need answers and we will be doing it all without our trusted and experienced friend.

When we arrive back at Benny’s, Bean decides to head out first thing in the morning. We are relieved for that anyway.

The Lord MUST protect the naïve…

The plan was for us to fly to Tampa and spend the next ten days getting Eye Quit ready to sail to Tavernier and then sailing her to this destination; followed by a couple of days relaxing aboard and getting used to using the dinghy to row ashore. Neither of us want to be tied up permanently at the dock; we want to swing to an anchor in the middle of the harbor, much the same way that our friend Bradley has done for the past few years.

We boarded the airplane in Albuquerque on Thursday with a list of things we needed to accomplish with the boat before we left the dock for the trip south and a suitcase full of things we thought we needed to safely accomplish this 150 mile trip south from Apollo Beach to Tavernier. I expected the airport security to laugh at us as we tried to haul this stuff through the metal detectors, but there wasn’t so much as a question about what this odd collection might be for.

My plan was to spend a couple of days getting the boat ready and try to leave the dock behind Benny’s house on Sunday or Monday. Our friend, Bradley, who lives in Tavernier, had spent the past month and a half in Terre Haute, IN caring for his mom, who is adjusting to new surroundings and desperately misses him when he’s gone. Everyone should have a friend like him; one never worries about their back when they have friends like Bradley. As much of a free spirit as he is, he is logical, thoughtful and dependable. He drove to Apollo Springs from Terre Haute and met us at the boat on the Thursday we arrived. The plan was for him to help us get the boat ready and then to sail with us to Tavernier. We were going to rent a car in the Keys, drive him and ourselves back to the Tampa area, for us to fly back to Albuquerque and for him to retrieve his car and get back to the part of the world he likes best…aboard his boat.

The first dilemma to be faced was whether to get the boat to a marina to have the bottom cleaned and repainted or to clean it the best we could beside the dock and then sail to Tavernier, where the cost of having the boat hauled and bottom done is significantly cheaper. Bradley, Lara and I had long conversations about this issue and the decision was to get the bottom cleaned the best we could with mask and fins beside the dock and then get the boat to Tavernier for more extensive work and to give us a chance to make some more money to pay for things. The other part of that equation that took a load off our minds was the conclusion that if we wanted to, we could motor down the Intracoastal Waterway for most of the trip south rather than sail out into the Gulf of Mexico for the trip. All in all I was starting to feel pretty good about the way things were going.

We worked to knock out items on our “to do” list under the watchful eye of Benny and his strenuous physical labor helping us accomplish a couple of things that absolutely needed to get done for safety reasons and which left him bloody as he hung upside down in the engine compartment replacing the stuffing in the packing nut. What the hell did I know about a packing nut. All of my previous sailboats had outboard engines to move them around the harbor. Despite the fact that Benny had our money and we had the title, as long as Eye Quit sat at his dock, she was still his boat and he was gonna do right by her.

By Saturday we were ready for me to get into the water to see if I could get some of the growth off the boat’s bottom and I decided to start with a stout scraper at the boat’s stern at the propeller and prop shaft, the only metal below the water line. Fins, snorkel and mask…it was a holding your breath kind of job. I grabbed the prop and felt the growth on it and slid my hand up the prop shaft to feel the neglect there as well. This wasn’t going to be easy.

There is a locker at the rear of the cockpit which holds some necessities such as life vests, storm anchor, horn (way too rusty to use) and a two-bladed propeller. As I was under the boat, holding onto the propeller using the scraper to try to dislodge growth from prop and shaft, my mind shifted back to why that two-bladed prop was in the locker; Benny told me that he had replaced the original two-bladed prop for a three-bladed one that would move the boat with more ease. Something was wrong. My physical senses were struggling to catch up with my brain. The prop attached to the prop shaft on the boat only had two blades. Not possible, I thought. And, yet, there was the truth. As I felt about, the blades were obviously set at an angle to each other that led me to believe that there HAD been a third blade on this prop. I took another breath at the surface and went back down and felt where the third blade should have been and found the stubble of where the blade had been. Dammit!!! I came back to the surface, climbed back aboard and announced my finding to Bradley and Lara and then walked across the grass toward Benny, who was sitting on his back porch watching our activity to announce my finding to him too. “Not possible” was his response. BUT, it was true.

This boat could obviously not be moved under power missing one blade of its propeller. There would probably be no faster way to destroy the transmission or engine than to try to move using the engine. My mind was already calculating the time this was going to cost us to repair, not to mention the cost in greenbacks. That three-bladed propeller had been on the boat for at least 20 years. I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to remove and replace.

I like to think that I am pretty calm and level headed when things start to go wrong. My mind swirls with the possibilities of what it takes to come out the other side in good shape. BUT, when things start to go south in multiples, I can get overwhelmed if I’m not careful. All of this was happening while I tried to keep Lara from freaking out or from coming to the conclusion that I had made a horrible mistake suggesting and buying this boat. God, I wanted her to love this boat the way I did. I wanted her to love the idea of living aboard her the way that I did.

Benny mentioned that the guy across the canal from his house was a scuba diver and might be able to help. We talked to him and settled on $100 as the cost of him getting in the water and removing the old prop. He worked hard at it, but our faith in his ability to be successful rapidly evaporated. He managed to get the nuts off the end of the shaft, but the prop would not budge, even when he went to his buddy’s house and got the proper tool. At the end of Saturday our options had dwindled to finding someone whose expertise was removing props like ours while the boat was still in the water (i.e. a professional diver in the marine repair/salvage business) or to have the boat towed to a marina, where the boat could be hauled out of the water and the job done right. Of course, by now the sun is setting on Saturday and finding someone to help on a Sunday, especially in light of the fact that most marinas that we could afford were closed on Sunday and Monday, was looking bleak. I started to question whether we were going to get this project completed in the ten days we had planned. I wondered (to myself) if we weren’t going to have to leave the boat at Benny’s house till we returned in January for a couple of weeks.

Saturday wasn’t through with us however. Now would start the most frightening part of our short-lived adventure. Benny wanted to show Bradley how to change the oil in the diesel engine and we removed the companionway steps and garbage receptacle to expose the engine and allow us access to all the necessary places. In the process of doing that, Benny pointed out something to Bradley toward the back of the engine and as Bradley reached into the engine compartment he bumped the hose (like a radiator hose) that connected the galley sink to the through hull fitting that takes ice box melt and galley liquid to the sea. The bump knocked the rusted fitting that connects the hose and the sink off the bottom of the sink and below the waterline. Needless to say, early physics lessons tell you that when the end of the hose is below the waterline, water is going to come rushing in, which it did.

Why the ferrous metal fittings that hold the hose to the bottom of the sink were there was obvious. The boat had been built before plastic became the salvation of the plumbing industry. We quickly raised the top end of the hose above the waterline and the gushing of the water subsided, but water was still coming into the boat. The flashlight showed us the problem; there was a split in the hose at the bottom of the hose about ½” long right where the bottom of the hose joined the brass through hull fitting. Damn. There was by now plenty of water in the bilge and yet the bilge pump had not come on. Benny was there with us on the boat and he was the calmest person on the boat. I don’t know what was going through Lara’s head, but I know what I was thinking. “This damned boat is going to sink, right here at Benny’s dock”. I could not get that thought out of my head.



Testing the bilge pump was one of the items on our to do list, but we hadn’t progressed that far yet. Benny reached down into the bilge and pulled up on the float, thinking that perhaps it was just stuck, but NOTHING! Water continued to fill the bilge. Following the electrical connections, Benny and Bradley found that the power line to the bilge pump was split in two. I will save you the angst that followed as Bradley and Benny tried to connect the two ends of the wires in a waterproof way with problems preventing their success. The fittings that Benny had aboard were too large for the wires leading to the bilge pump and wouldn’t hold. I grabbed an electrical connector out of a drawer aboard and “yelled fuck it…use this damned thing before we sink!” They did and we wrapped it with lots of electrical tape and reached down into the bilge again.

I need to say something about Lara at this point. She knew we were in trouble but set about trying to be productive in the only way she knew how. Earlier in the day Benny had showed her how to install the handle for the auxiliary bilge pump and how to use the hand pump. She crawled out the companionway entrance over the three of us trying to solve the problem and took up a station in the cockpit with one hand on the handle to the auxiliary bilge pump….waiting for orders or waiting for the level of angst to rise to the point where she could not take it any more. Bless her!!!

After installing the traditional twist on electrical connector Bradley reached down into the bilge to pull up on the float to see if things were going to work. In a bit of levity (the ONLY levity in the past several hours) Bradley dropped his new, waterproof to 30’, cell phone into the bilge, where it shone as a beacon from 3’ down. Finally some laughter, as he reached down to retrieve that phone with its spotlight that he was so proud of. Pulling up on the float, the bilge pump kicked into action and we could hear the water being expelled out the stern of the boat. I wondered if the audible sigh was mine, but I think it was Lara’s. Our baby was going to survive. The pump ran for about 20 minutes before the bilge was emptied. The water had been mere inches below the cabin sole when the pump solved the problem.

Now, we had to solve the problem of the split in the hose at the through hull fitting. I had tried to use my hand to close the valve of the through hull fitting to no avail. I was going to have to work on that later. We used about a half roll of duct tape to slow the flow of water into the boat to a trickle and tied up the top end of the hose above the waterline and decided to get some sleep. Both Bradley and I slept in the main salon and listened all night as the bilge pump would kick on about every minute and a half and run for about five seconds. It was at least manageable. I don’t think I slept much.

As I lay there listening to the bilge pump kick on and off, I knew that I was going to have to get the valve on that through hull fitting into the “off” position. I hesitated to use a big metal tool to accomplish that because I knew that it had been a long time since anyone had opened and close ANY of the through hull fittings and didn’t want to break off the handle and create more of a problem for myself. Naïve? What the hell was I thinking when we flew off on this adventure. I knew NOTHING about what it was going to take to keep this beauty afloat. What a knucklehead I am sometimes. You learn quickly, however, when faced with this kind of adversity. The traditional definition of a boat being “a hole in the water, surrounded by wood (in the old days), into which you pour money” went through my head a million times. I was afraid that our money was going to sit there on the bottom in front of Benny’s house or be scattered all over Tampa Bay before we were done.

While no one was looking on Sunday morning, I took a pipe wrench and fastened it over the handle on the valve of the through hull fitting and moved the handle a fraction of an inch. Then, I reached in with my hand and twisted with all my might and got the handle to move to the off position in fractions. Finally, it was fully closed and the water stopped flowing into the boat. Thank God! I hadn’t asked God for this success, but thanked him for it this Sunday morning. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep again till I was sure that water wasn’t going to fill us up. I proudly announced my success to Lara and Bradley and got a big collective sigh.

The sun rose on Sunday to much indecision. What the hell were we going to do? We tried making phone calls to see if we could get answers, but, what the hell, it was Sunday. We worked on some more of our to do list and were feeling good about that when Bradley got a call from the nursing home where his mom was living that things were not going well with his mom in the past 24 hours. Gradually the decision was made on Sunday that we were going to have to go to Tavernier on Monday so that Bradley could take care of some personal things and to VOTE early – since the following day way was election day, November 4, 2008, the day when hopefully we were going to rid ourselves as Americans of the buffoon who had been in charge of things for the past eight years and his political party.

So it begins, Lara's take, day one

We started this blog after we got back from Tampa and to be honest it’s a daunting task to try to sit down and try to recount all that transpired during those 10 days. So much to go through but how do you relate those emotions and experiences? It was the start of a new day, a new dream and a new life during one of the most historically tumultuous times our country has ever seen.

The day before we left for Tampa to meet and great our newest member of the family ( i am very animistic) i could sense JW’s reticence. He had made the decision mostly on his own and rightfully so. I know nothing of sailing, having only gone out to sea on a sailboat twice in my entire life. I knew from the inception of this idea that it was much more JW’s journey than mine as far as the logistics went.

This is par for the course of our relationship; i am the proverbial idea “man”. JW is the mechanic of dreams and i must say that he is a champ at it. If you can conceive it he can make it work.

I knew that if it was going to work i had to let the master sit quietly to research and ponder just what this dream would look like, smell like, feel like. He is quite gifted in that regard. He has the patience that i lack and the vision that takes into account all of the details no matter how small.

So there we were, battered, perhaps beaten, and for the first time in our relationship, not confident that we could pull it off. A sentiment we would never admit, to ourselves or each other. We were going to Tampa to sail a boat to the Keys. Thank goodness we had our trusty Bean meeting us there to help us sail.

I must tell you that I think when a couple enters a relationship it can be difficult to merge your friends. JW and I have been truly blessed that we have been able to adopt each others friends. We both came into the relationship with opposite sex really good friends, the kind who know your secrets and love you anyway. JW had Kathy and I had Bean. They are both truly exceptional people and great adventurers. You will hear more about Kathy in future blogs, but it was Bean who got us through this chapter and i hope we helped him as well.

The second that we decided to try this, Bean was there to answer any questions and address any concerns. I had always tried to talk to Bean at least once a month. As this plan unfolded JW began to talk to Bean two and three times a day. Bean’s encouragement and experience helped to keep us going!

10/29/08

It emotionally starts with the two of us getting ready to fly to Tampa Bay at six am the next morning and we were really quite apprehensive. JW was nervous that I would hate the boat or he couldn’t find his way to Tavernier.

I was just nervous about the work i was sure was to follow and the fact that I had to be taught almost everything. I HATE not knowing what to do, mostly because i don’t want to be the weakest link. My biggest trigger is a heavy sigh, the kind that someone who knows what the hell to do gives the person they can’t make understand what the hell to do.


10/30/08

We left for the Sunport with trepidation. We were two people who desperately wanted to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat and prove to themselves and each other that they could do anything they set their minds on. After an uneventful flight (thankfully!) we landed in Tampa.

Jan, our broker met us at the airport and took us to Benny’s house and our new boat.



I feel that Jan’s help in this undertaking was way above the call of duty. She is truly a nice person and loves to sail. She helped us over and over again even though she could NOT have made much of a commission on this sale.


Half of Jan.

So there we were in Apollo Beach, FL. Palin/McCain signs everywhere, a cul-de-sac determined in its attempt to stop gay marriage. We were in enemy territory days before the election. I made a mental note about how grateful I was that we would be on the sea when the election came to fruition. We could escape! Tortolla isn’t that far right??? RIGHT??????

We parked in Benny’s drive way, no political signs so there is a sigh of relief there (also). Heh.

Benny has his own power, he lends the boat power, i have a sense that Benny is guarded to an extent, it isn’t because of JW, it is because of me. Will I love her? Will I understand what a wonderful boat she is?? Will I appreciate her? Jan understands immediately, regaling me with information about how this boat has a rock solid hull, a hull within a hull really. This boat is safe, she is trustworthy, she is loved!

All of this is unnecessary really as i am drawn to her immediately. She is lonely, Benny only comes out occasionally to see her. She wants to SAIL! And she is so inviting. She has been loved, taken care of.

I enter the cabin, teak as far as the eye can see, teak that has been taken care of. She smells faintly of neglect and mildew, but she is thirty, so her pride is in how faintly she has been neglected.





She allows me immediately to think about how to see to her needs. I produce a pillow that I bought at 10K (an awesome music festival) and some pretty textiles I have purchased in my travels. I make her stunningly mine in the first half hour. She invites me to make her mine. We are friends immediately there is no lack of trust. I want to get her out of that mean-spirited-gated-community-with-dock as fast as my faculties can rescue her.

Jan takes her leave with Benny’s parting gift, an anon, a fruit that grows in his backyard. I am sorry to see Jan go but eager to bond with this wonderful boat. I go into the cabin and lay down on the port side settee. I am exhausted but happy. She likes us. I can tell.

JW comes into the cabin with the most vulnerable look on his face that I have ever seen. He is still second guessing, the loss of the office having shaken us to the core, we start this adventure with the only doubt we have ever experienced. After all we have always been successful, a team to be envied really, until March of this year.

I can see his emotions play on his face as if a movie real: “Lara’s a trooper, she won’t hurt me by hating it, she will be a good sport but does she love this boat like I do, because if she doesn’t I have failed, I can’t fail my darlin, you love it don’t you?”

We have always been a good team because we communicate, so he asks immediately with the tone and demeanor of someone who needs to know: “are you disappointed darlin?”

I don’t have words in my substantial arsenal to convince him of how much I love her. She is perfect, if only we weren’t at Benny’s house in this hatefest cul-de-sac. I long to be at anchor anywhere but here with her because she is ready for a new adventure. WE need her as much as she needs us.

We wait patiently for the arrival of Bradley Bean and our sail.

While we are waiting, night falls and we break her in .

JW talks about buying the boat.

The idea of spending time on a sailboat and spending less time working picked up steam when I had a conversation with a colleague about Social Security. I spent my 64^th birthday packing up our belongings at the office we were losing (us trying to get refinancing just as the real estate market realized what they had done and went “oh, shit”) and prepared to move some of them home and some of them to an office generously offered by another colleague. It seems that my idea of waiting another year till I was 65 to “retire” and collect 100% of my social security was nixed by the government, who changed the retirement age (100% of benefits) to 66 for people born in my part of the baby boom. In April 2008 I got all the documents together and headed over to the Social Security office to get them to start giving me some, if not 100%, of my money back. I had been working non-stop since I was 15 years old and was tired of it. The sailboat was sounding better and better.

The bookmarks on my web browser started filling up with all things related to sailboats and quite a number of yacht brokers, who described all manner of shiny boats, some with out of control prices. The “sailboat” search on my ebay account also took a jillion hits as I looked at whatever I could find. Lara and I knew that we wanted to live aboard the boat, principally in a harbor in the Keys, but with some extended cruising as we moved more toward retirement and became more comfortable with the limited resources we would have. The following is the mental list that became important to us as we looked for the right boat:

1. I remember a quote from one of my books about sailboats that opined “you’ll never like the way a boat sails if you don’t like the way it looks”. So, number one on the list of what we were looking for was a sailboat that looked good.

2. Since the Keys, Bahamas and Caribbean were going to be the principal cruising and living grounds, the boat needed a shallow draft – less than 5’ was what I went looking for.

3. The boat manufacturer needed to have a reputation for building stout boats. Since we wanted to have the option to do some open water cruising, we wanted a boat that had a reputation for being stout enough to go cruising, not just day sail around the lake somewhere. Of particular help were the websites maintained by groups of owners of boats that we started to be interested in. Most of those people were pretty honest about what they liked and didn’t like about their boat and we took their advice to heart. We were pretty obviously interested in a used boat – most definitely something over 20 years old.

4. Not wanting to spend all of our time working on the boat, the boat needed to be fiberglass, not wood or some other building material.

5. From a living aboard perspective, combined with the idea that we wanted a boat that could be easily sailed by the two of us, as well as a purchase price perspective, we settled on looking for boats in the 30’ – 35’ range.

6. Comfortable berth for the two of us; private head with shower; compact galley and limited sleeping room for guests (we definitely wanted guests to join us, but for them to get tired of the arrangement before we got tired of them) were other things we were looking for.

7. Cost. I can’t count the number of conversations Lara and I had about how to finance this new dream. I shall forever be indebted to her that she kept an open mind, came up with good suggestions and was willing to continue massaging the possibilities until we figured out what to do. Sell the house; refinance the house; sell other properties we have bought during our time here in New Mexico; a dozen possibilities. One thing we knew was that we were planning on coming back to New Mexico for a good part of the year (we truly love our life here in the mountains and our friends and colleagues at work), so we wanted someplace to live when we came back.

8. In line with the item above, it turns out that we had a bit of luck related to cost. We were looking for a boat at precisely the time that the economy headed south. The best advice that we had from the woman who became our “yacht broker”, named Jan, was “if you see a boat you’re interested in, go ahead and make an offer, no matter how ridiculously low it seems to you”. We took her advice to heart when we made our one and only offer.

9. Knowing that we wanted to live with our boat on the hook, as opposed to at the dock, in the Keys, we wanted to buy a boat that was within sailing distance of her proposed home by a couple of novice sailors and didn’t have to be trucked down Rte. 1 to the Keys. So, we were looking for a boat in Florida.

Keeping in mind all of the things above, we began to focus our attention on Endeavour yachts; in the 32’ to 37’ range. As it turned out, we settled on an Endeavour 32, the owner of which was represented by the broker mentioned above, Jan. One of the things that intrigued me about this boat was that it was a one owner boat. When I went down to Florida to see this boat and another, I had an opportunity to meet its owner, Benny. He had been there at the manufacturer in the Tampa Bay area that day in 1978 when the hull of the boat was unmolded (and I am convinced that he had probably been there every day of its construction). He loved that boat and it showed. He knew every square inch of his boat and was more than willing to share all that he knew with this novice (I should say that I have owned two sailboats before this one; a 16’ day sailer that I bought new and a 22’ sailboat that I bought new in the 70’s and sailed on Lake Michigan; Lara’s nautical experience was on power boats in the midwest). Benny had named the boat Eye Quit while looking forward to his future retirement.

I had placed a small refundable deposit on the boat before flying to Tampa to see the “Eye Quit” and called home to have the “this is it” discussion with Lara. Lara’s only comment, “if this is it, go buy it”. Benny is in his 80’s and as the broker’s ad for the boat said, “the owner has completed his voyage and needs to pass on this gem to someone ready to make that journey a reality”. Benny was in love with his boat, but understood the necessity of the timing of passing it on to someone who would enjoy it. The boat had been parked in the canal behind his house for a few years without being sailed. That has caused some minor problems (they all seem major at the time they’re happening), but all in all, the boat is a beauty. My hat is off to Benny for the love he showed that boat over the years.

I returned to Albuquerque with a camera full of pictures and a million questions. Benny always took my phone calls and was patient while describing what needed to be done. Lara and I planned to go back to Tampa a month later to take possession of Eye Quit and to move it to the Keys. More later!

To view the boat and the Yacht Central web site go here: http://yachtcentral.us/yachtcentral/index.html

In the begining.......

Ok, so I am trying to decide exactly when and where this madcap adventure began. Hmmmmm. Did it begin when i was bored and decided to IM a guy on AOL who had latin in his profile and sent him an instant message that said "Hey, sailor, going my way?".

Did it begin when that same guy called me at my student housing apartment in law school one morning and i informed him that i had had a vivid dream and was now certain that i was going to move to New Mexico?

Did it begin when that same latin lovin, online livin, crazy man asked me if he could tag along to New Mexico with me?

Maybe it began when we decided to practice law together? I must say the training of living together, riding to work together, working together and entertaining each other did come in handy. We have been able to be around each other 24/7 for almost a decade so we didn't have to ask ourselves the question "can we live together on a small boat for at least 6 months out of the year without killing each other?"

In fact, we get gloomy and lonely when we are sperated from each other for more than a few hours. WIERDOS!!!!!

I believe I can trace the impetous to March of 2008. We were living the stressed out life of "acquire, Acquire, ACQUIRE!!!!!"

We were supporting not only our cabin up the mountain and our actual house in the awesome East Mountains but also a small office building right across from the Court house.

We were stressed, we were exhausted and we weren't enjoying our lives very much. We were happy because we were together but we were tired of fighting for a living (criminal defense) and scrambling to reach a nut that would pay for our staff, our business expenses and our own growing basic needs bundle.

Then the real estate market went crazy bad right in the middle of our negotiations for buying our office building. We were faced with a dilemma, restructure to the cost of twenty thousand dollars more than we anticipated or let the building go. It was a first for us. We had always succeeded in our hair brained adventures. They never went quite the way we planned but they worked.

for instance:
"Hey JW lets go see the Dead at Red Rocks for our honeymoon". "Lets take our motorcycles, it will be a pretty drive from Albuquerque to Denver".

Hey, who would have thunk that it would snow in late June? heh. But i would couch it in successful terms. Now, I can ride anywhere on my motorcycle without hesitation and i learned that i can ride down the interstate in the sleet with a semi crawling up my butt and not cry.







Yeah, most of our adventures go like that. But we have a good time.

So there we were facing our first real failure as a team since we hooked up over a decade ago.
I went home the night after we learned that we were more than likely going to lose the building with no positive thought or plan in my head. I was very down and depressed and couldn't figure out a way to bring myself out of it. I knew JW was feeling the same way.

As i sat in my living room i looked around and noticed something that i had never really thought about before. We have many, many bookshelves and many, many books in our home. What had never really registered with me was that most of JW's books that he brought to the relationship were sailing books. Although he never really talked about it i knew that he had left an O'Day behind on the shores of Lake Michigan. One of the many prices he had paid to enter a new life.

The books made me think about our good and truly crazy-in-a-good-way friend Brad or as i have called him for almost 15 years "Bradley Bean", Bean for short.

Bean hailed originally from Terre Haute Indiana but had always had a lust for the sea. He finally made those dreams come true by purchasing a sailboat and living on the hook in Tavernier Fla.

As many others have, many times before, i asked myself "If he can do it, why can't we?"

After about three glasses of wine i called the Bean and confessed that our building was in jeopardy, that we were miserable and that i was giving serious thought to horking his gig in the Keys. He talked me down about it, listened patiently to my story and answered my question by saying "Yeah, if i can do it why not you?"

I felt better immediately. I approached JW on the subject. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than a huge grin plastered itself on his face. The gloom lifted almost immediately after the decision was made. We began to discuss what we needed to look for in our boat.

I called Bean back the next day to see if he took me seriously to which he replied "I am already sitting here looking at a trader to help find you a boat."

Thus began this journey. We let the building go, downsized our office and business and began the search for a boat.

Until next time when JW will fill you in on the Boat search. Stay tuned for such dramatic fare as the almost sinking of said boat and many other adventures.

Ship of Fools