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).