Nov 14 - 21

Again, I'll do a week at once and just hit the highlights.  We are still in Ft. Pierce, but the Bahamas may be in the foreseeable future.  The weather has been consistently bad from a cross-the-Gulf-Stream point of view.  We have been sunny and warm until Saturday when it rained a lot.  But the problem has been the wind.  It has been blowing strong from the east, making big seas offshore, for two weeks now.  But, there is a strong cold front moving through here tonight which should change things.  The best time to cross the Gulf Stream this time of year is usually right after the passage of a northerly front.  The wind clocks around to the south or west for a couple of days and the seas should calm down.  It looks like this should start to happen Thursday and be good through Saturday.  We'll see.

In the meantime, we have fixed all the things that the surveyor found.  The hoses are replaced, and thru-hulls where the bilge pumps output goes are replaced.  They are right at the waterline, so to replace them without getting water in the boat, we had to tie the spare halyard to a dock line, take it two slips over and tie it to a piling, and then tighten the line so the boat heeled over enough to keep the thru-hulls out of the water while we changed them.  It got a few looks from the neighbors, but it worked.

Our friend Mike from Houston came in Thursday to visit.  We took advantage of his rent-a-car to run some errands.  Went to the bank and got cash for the trip, took the cat to the vet to get a certificate of health in case we are asked for it in the Bahamas and get flea medicine (more about that in a minute), provision at Sam's (despite my loathing of Wal-Mart), and check a book store and West Marine for a cruising guide.  We enjoyed Mike's visit and sent him home about 03:00 Sunday morning, since he had a 06:30 flight out of Ft. Lauderdale.

The cat has not been off the boat for almost three years, except when we were in NY and he spent six weeks at my brother's house.  Before I got him, he was inside consistently for seven years.  So, he has never had a flea problem.  Well, my brother lives in the country, and his cat goes outside everyday.  So, Bimmy brought some hitchhikers along with him when we returned to the boat in September.  We had dusted him with flea powder before we left NY, but that didn't get them all.  So, we got some of the new medicine that you put on their back once a month.  Within hours, we were picking dead fleas off him.  Hope that does it.  We did get multiple doses in case we need them while we're gone.

More about provisioning.  Some of my close friends and family know that Wal-Mart is amongst my least favorite companies.  But, consider this.  At Sam's, you can buy a 36-pack of Pepsi for $.21/can.  In the Bahamas a can of Pepsi goes for about $1.00/can.  Rum, on the other hand, is cheap in the Caribbean.  So, we will take over 200 cans of Pepsi, and no rum.  Pretty much anything we would need is available in the major towns in the Bahamas, but it will always cost substantially more.  So, we plan to take as much as we can with us.  The freezer is full, leaving room for one bag of ice, and the v-berth is loaded down.  Back to Wal-Mart, they are a predatory corporation that takes advantage of their size and dominant place in the market to squeeze their employees, and their suppliers to their advantage.  Yes, they may have the best price in town, but how many people were forced to work overtime without extra pay, how many illegal aliens did they allow subcontractors to use, how many small family-owned stores did they put out of business, and how many vendors went broke thinking they had the golden ring when they bet their whole business on a deal with Wal-Mart?  And what happened to their old advertising campaign about using US suppliers?  Guess they ran out of small US suppliers to squeeze and had to move on to China.  Enough of my soap box.  If we had a better option, I would have used it, but I was weak and succumbed to the opportunity to save some money since Mike had a Sam's Club card.  Besides, I let Barb pay for it, so technically I still haven't shopped at Wal-Mart.

We did get a weather scare with Tropical storm Gamma.  The initial forecast when the storm was named, had it following Wilma's path almost exactly.  That would have meant we would have had to strip the boat of everything that catches the wind and hunker down for an uncomfortable day.  But, thankfully, the storm turned and diminished and pretty much fizzled out without any threat to the US. 

So, with that, hopefully the next update will be from the Bahamas.  Once there, the updates will probably be about weekly, since we will be relying on the satellite phone to post them.

GPS N 27-28.104 W 80-19.649  Miles made good this leg 0.  Total miles covered 3589.