What started out to be a nice easy task yesterday, turned into an all day affair. This was not what we planned for our first day after an ocean cruise of 36 hours. So, we decided that we would rest today.
We spent the morning lounging, reading, and snoozing. Around 11:30 a.m. EST, we decided to check the location of the fuel dock at the Palm Beach Yacht Club. We went outside and the first thing that I noticed was that I could see the bottom. I pointed this out to Mike and Mike's first question was, "What is our water depth?" We aren't used to seeing the bottom of the water unless it is extremely shallow. Neither of us can remember being able to see the bottom the last time we were here; of course, neither of us looked either.
We climbed into the dinghy, and spent the next 20 minutes trying to find our anchor and looking over the side of our dinghy at the bottom. We wanted to try to find out our anchor to see how it was laying. It was a new experience for us and one that I look forward to repeating as we cruise the islands. We finally gave up because we believed that the anchor was actually underneath the boat due to tide and wind.
We headed south in Lake Worth to the Palm Beach Yacht Club. When we got there, we saw a 120 or 130 foot yacht. There was certainly enough room for us to tie up at the fuel dock behind it with no problem. We headed back to the boat.
When we got back to the boat, I decided that I wanted to go swimming. Of course, I had to check the water temperature; it was 76.9 degrees. I was going to go in slowly; Mike said I should just dive. We were in 10 feet of water after all. I. dove in and came back up freezing! I let everyone within earshot know that I was freezing! I swam back to the boat in a strong current while Mike rigged a line for me to hold onto. One of my goals, while swimming, was to clean the knot log on our B&G network system.
I experimented with going underneath the boat on the starboard side. I found that, due to current, I was unable to make it very far. I half swam and was half dragged to the bow of the boat where I rode the current down the port side of the boat. I tried to go under the boat to where the knot log is, but I was unable to get far enough under the boat in the current. I gave up on that until we had a slack tide and no wind. Mike tossed me a brush so I could start cleaning the bottom of the boat. I could not get very far down, but what I could get is now clean. Mike got tired of pulling the other side of the line and I was getting tired in the water, so he dragged me back to the bow of the boat and I floated down the starboard side to the ladder.
I climbed aboard the boat and used our deck shower to rinse off. Way cool! We had lunch of cheese and crackers. We sat outside reading for a little while, then Mike decided to call Liz. He spent the next 15 minutes tormenting her at the office with a description of our day, the temperature, and basically what a lovely day it had been.
As the sun started going down, we headed back inside. After a good dinner of chicken fajitas, we spent the evening reading our books. I also converted the voyages section of our web site to a new format. I converted to the new format so that it would be easier to upload pages as well as cheaper when we leave the U.S. Lotus Smart Suite Word Pro up loads an entire document every time I want to update the web site with a new log entry. By using Lotus fast site, a table of contents is automatically generated and only those pages that have been modified will be uploaded! With no duplication of effort it is much cheaper and much faster to use.
Voyages