We spent a few days organizing and cleaning the boat and eating at Lorelei’s restaurant of course! Lots of boat duties. Steve put the inflatable dock out to clean the boat and do his morning exercises. Enjoying the days.!

We were invited on a wonderful night sail on our new buddy on his awesome cat! It was amazing.!!

Hey peoples! I hope you are having a great day. Not a lot going on today but i have some pics for you!

Good morning sailing cruising fans family and anyone else who is checking out my blog. Today we are headed to Islamorada to check out the area and see whats up! It is a very nice day sail or motor not good wind today to sail. It is a narrow passage to get to another key. It is very shallow in most of the keys. Topwater boats are ok but the bigger ships and sailboats have to keep in the channels to keep from getting grounded. Today is my birthday so I will get to go search Islamorada for something cool! Check out the Sportsmen World Wide (bass pro) pics!

26 D 31.584’N 81 D 58.666’W

WELL its time to move on toward even more fun places. So i get my trusty pole and hop topside to unhook the mooring shackle from the number 1 ball this beautiful calm morning. As i step up to the starboard side of the boat i see the snubber attached with a shining big shackle to the thimble hooked to the ball with some large line. I pull the SB side up and wait for Captains signal to unhook and roll out! Given the signal i unhook the shackle drop the ball line and easy pull the snubber out of the water and lay it on the deck to dry in the south Florida sun, after that i will stow it away with the anchor line snubber in the anchor locker. Headed off to shark inlet to anchor out for the night. So to repeat a night in 2012 here i am on the bow again with a flashlight and notifying the captain of crab pots scattered before the entrance to the anchorage. “PORT 10 degrees” “STARBOARD 10” “crab pot dead ahead”. For several hours, hey sailing is never boring. So we get in to the only achorage around and there sit two big trawlers so the only place to anchor is…….RIGHT IN BETWEEN THEM. We had plenty of room so it was ok but it makes the big trawlers nervous when a sailboat gets that close at night. hahaha We finally got anchored after several minutes, we stayed on deck to make sure the anchor was secure and BOOM we were out! Sleeping in the beautiful national park with no light so dark dark dark and peaceful. Everyone have a great night.

CAPTAINS LOG: Make sure to keep the first mate/ Admiral on the bow with a powerful light at night when you are in a crab pot minefield.

Okay another day in Big Moose land! We are staying in Ft Myers today to relax and climb the mast to replace the everlost wind vane! I mean you would think our boat does not want a wind vane to stay in place on the mast. Somewhere in the ocean on the way to Panama city beach, St Andrews area our wind vane decided to go on vacation to the bottom of the ocean so the fish could keep track of currents i guess HAHA. So we had a new one ordered and sent to Steve’s moms house so we could replace it. WELL after another wind vane decided to make its escape somewhere in the ocean between Panama City Beach and Ft Myers we decided to make it extra secure on the mast. Captains Advice today is even if you cant see the hairline crack it is there and use all the new parts! Never take for granted the old ones are reusable. But since climbing the mast is so much fun why not climb it again!

Well it is a beautiful day here and am excited to eat at Snug Harbor. Well the fish was in small portions for the price but it was good. A lot of retired veterans were in attendance next to us. After that we walked down to the beach for a wonderful sunset>

SO we got up to a beautiful day to head to Ft Myers mooring field. After the hurricane the original mooring field is gone, but they have like 12 mooring balls and two for transients so we got one of the two. Thank goodness. It is close to the Slow speed sign but with a little cinching up of our snubber and chain we were safe from collision with that sign. It was actually a great mooring (26 dollars per night) and we decided to go to Doc Fords to eat that night.

The mooring field has a laundry room with one washer one dryer and its in the hotel across the street from the remodeled bathroom/showers (that happened to open that same day we came to the city). The old system of washers and dryers in the shower building have been replaced with commercial machines used only by the staff of the hotel Matanzas. The hotel manager was very nice and uber and lyft are readily available for transportation if needed. It cost us 15-16 dollars one way to the publix in ft myers, the beach publix was very difficult to get to due to continued construction so the other publix is your best bet.

The dinghy dock was destroyed in the hurricane so we had to tie up at the temporary dinghy dock right sown a canal by a restaurant and right behind to the Matanzas hotel pool . We tied up and climbed from our dingy to the nice board walkway that turned into a beautiful tiled walkway to the back of the hotel to the washroom next to the pool. SOO i brought our portabe chairs to the washroom and man they were comfortable. It took the clothes a long time to dry so we decided to run to doc fords get a timer for a table(one hour to one hour and a half wait) go back to the washroom finish the clothes and on the way back to Docs we got our notification for our table!! hahahahaha He got me to the dock i leaped elegantly from our little boat and ran