WAITING OUT WEATHER

As I finished our last post we were leaving Marco Island heading south to Marathon.  The first morning, we were bundled up with several layers under our foulies plus hats and gloves.  As the day wore on and the sun came out, we peeled off the layers and enjoyed a beautiful sail with a strong tailwind giving us 7-plus knots at times. 

We pulled into Little Shark River and anchored as the sun was disappearing behind the horizon.  It was  a dark, quiet, eerie night.  There was one other boat anchored downriver from us.  In this part of the Everglades, there are few people, no cell towers and no VHF communication.

Sometime in the middle of the night I began to hear the put-put of a small engine.  I thought it was probably fishermen and tried to go back to sleep.  Then scenes from the movie Deliverance began to flash in my mind.  The engine noise seemed to come from behind the boat, then beside the boat, then in front of the boat.  I listened for any noise that might signal intruders, but soon the engine noise began to fade and then disappeared.  I admonished myself for the wild imagination and went back to sleep.


Up early the next morning we ate breakfast underway and had another fine sailing day, reaching the Keys at mid-afternoon.

We are currently moored at Boot Key Harbor in Marathon.  It's a lovely protected harbor in the Middle Keys, about 50 miles east of Key West.  See

www.ci.marathon.fl.us/index.aspx?NID=26 and
www.bootkeyharbor.com.

We are experiencing a string of bad weather days.  "Come on," I hear you say.  "It's minus 20 degrees here in Indiana with five feet of snow and you're complaining about 60 degrees and high wind."

Well, here's my answer.   if you're living in the north country, you expect bitter cold weather.  If you have come to the tropics for the winter, you expect good weather, at least most of the time.  It's all in the expectations.

Our normal sunny blue skies and 80 degree 
weather have morphed into cold and windy.

We did have some beautiful days until about a week ago.  Since then, two cold fronts have come through almost back to back and we are expecting the daddy of all cold fronts on Sunday.  It's early for this kind of weather in Florida, with fronts coming one on top of the other. 

Our son Andy and his girlfriend Jill are due to arrive at the same time as the cold front on Sunday.  We are hoping for a break in the bad weather so we can all sail to Mexico next week.  Time will tell.  If we can't go to Mexico while Andy and Jill are here, I hope at least to have some warm weather for them.

In the meantime, we are busy with boat projects.  Phil is installing LED lights in the state room.  They draw much less power than regular lights.  I am updating my blog, baking brownies and researching marinas in Key West. 

Baking brownies serves two purposes.  Good to eat 
and the oven makes the boat toasty warm.

Initially, we planned to stay on a mooring ball there, but the Key West mooring field has no protection from the north. Thirty-five knot winds from the north are forecast on Sunday, which would make for a bouncy night or two out on the water and a soaking, cold dinghy ride to go ashore.

All this assumes we can get a break in the weather to sail Sunshine to Key West, about 50 miles west of here.  If that doesn't happen, we'll rent a car and pick up the kids at the airport on Sunday.


In the meantime, we'll pray to the weather gods and I'll keep baking brownies.