Old and New Friends and a Great Honor

After leaving Nicole and John, we headed to Melbourne, Florida to catch up with old friends, Laura and Andy, formerly of Windswept II. We met them first in Trinidad in 2002 and really enjoyed their company. We haven't seen them since, but have always kept in touch as cruisers do. We had so much to chat about, I neglected to take any photos, but managed to dig up an old photo from 2002. My, but we looked young...er.

We headed to the Melbourne Gam the next day. To say we were verklempt would be an understatement. We still had not finished our presentations and we were feeling a bit under the gun. David was giving a seminar on anchors and anchoring techniques, I was participating in the Women's Forum. The both of us had been asked to give the keynote address on Saturday evening and this was primarily my job to complete. There was a lot to do and we weren't prepared. It's not that we hadn't tried. I'd started the keynote presentation over a month before, but each time I thought I'd finished, we agreed it was too long, boring and lame. We needed a different approach and hadn't found it yet.

We worked in our hotel room pretty much non-stop for two days, taking time out to register for the gam and have drinks and dinner with friends one evening. David created animated maps for the keynote presentation, then set about finishing up his anchoring presentation The two big challenges for the keynote address? 1) Condensing 16 years of “off the beaten track” adventures into about an hour and 2) keeping an after-cocktail & dinner group of cruisers awake from 8:30pm to 9:45 pm ... knowing that cruiser midnight occurs somewhere around 9pm. Finally, we came up with an approach we hoped would keep the crowd engaged and worked hard to complete it, tweak it and rehearse it. Whew!

We showed up in the afternoon for David's presentation which unfortunately ran concurrent with the Women's Forum. When I heard the applause from the room next door, I knew David's presentation had been a success. The forum was somewhat disjointed, but it was fun meeting so many new women sailors and getting reacquainted with so many old friends.

We headed into the general meeting where the “state of the union” address was delivered and subsequently awards were presented. We were pleased to be recognized for having completed our circumnavigation.

More importantly, however, was being presented with the Seven Seas Award, SSCA's most prestigious award. Knowing the venerable cruisers who have received this award in the past, we were honored, humbled and thrilled. Being recognized by the SSCA for doing something we have loved was beyond wonderful.

Though a bit nervous before our evening presentation, we were comfortable once we got started. A friend checked for rotten tomatoes at the door and we didn't notice anyone falling asleep, so it was a wonderful experience, but we sighed in relief when it was over. Old friends and new friends took the time to come up and wish us well. It warmed our hearts and made us feel proud to be part of such awesome camaraderie.

Exhilarated and exhausted, we bade adieu to sailing friends and headed to St. Petersburg on Florida's west coast to visit our oldest son and wife and see their new home. We haven't been to St. Pete in ages and we're looking forward to a little exploring.

Off to Florida - Fun and Friends

It's been a hectic, crazy whirlwind of a time in Florida. We took a red-eye, non-reclining seat, uncomfortable Frontier flight from Vegas to Orlando. The usual … it sounded cheap, but by the time we paid for baggage, reserved seats together (in the back of the plane, no less), it ended up being fairly expensive. Bleary-eyed and tired, (although I still had time to pose with Snow White… after all we are in Disney territory), we picked up our rental car and made our way to Davenport, just south of Orlando to visit old cruising friends, John and Nicole, whom we'd first met in Tahiti.

Nicole and John are most excellent hosts and very hospitable folks and excused us early the first night so we could catch up on our zzzzz's, and we did. They live in a gated community with lots of walking paths lined with live oak trees, draped with Spanish moss, aka old man's beard. We walked each morning we were there. The inhabitants in these marshy wetlands and lakes are a bit different than we're used to seeing in the Las Vegas desert. We saw a sign warning us not to swim, feed or touch the alligators. As if!!!

Then we saw the alligator. Yikes! Watch out, poodles!

Our visit centered around eating, chatting, drinking, eating, drinking, eating and local exploration. Recovered and rearing to go, our hosts whisked us away first to lunch at the Cherry Pocket, a local, well-known hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served up excellent seafood in a rustic sort of atmosphere.

We ate on the deck, enjoying the warm Florida sun and watched anoles and geckos skitter across the floor. A big turtle dawdled near the water's edge and wood storks plied the nearby waters for lunch.

One day we visited Winter Park and took the scenic lake tour on a pontoon boat. There's lots of old money here and the “cottages” spoke to early 20th century wealth and luxury. The shallow-draft boat wended its way through circuitous, narrow canals lined with lush trees and foliage that connected one lake to another.

We were surprised, as was the tour guide, when David spotted a bald eagle perched on a treetop.

Lunch was at Bosphorous, a Turkish restaurant that John and Nicole knew well. The surroundings were Turkish antiques and the authentic food was awesome. The desserts looked tantalizing, but the appetizers and mains in which we indulged didn't leave room. Maybe next time?

Not far away was the Morse Museum, the foremost collection of Tiffany glass in the world.

We waltzed through the galleries of exquisite stained glass windows and lamps and art deco creations. The lighting was perfect to take advantage of the rich colors and intricate designs. It was almost dreamlike.

We headed back to John and Nicole's in time to watch the election returns together. In years past, David and I had a tradition of ordering in Chinese food and sitting in front of the tube to watch the news coverage of the election and our hosts were only too happy to oblige us. We noshed on Chinese and watched as the results of this most contentious contest rolled in. Though unhappy with the results, we were oh so happy it was finally over.

And then, just like that, it was time to leave and head to the upcoming SSCA gam. Our presentations were still not completed and we were feeling a bit of angst as we hugged John and Nicole goodbye and caught up with reality during the drive to Melbourne, Florida.

Stay tuned for more angst as we “gam it up” in Melbourne.

The Blue View - When Blue Does Pink

We're in Florida and I'm up to my eyeballs in preparation for my SSCA presentation on anchoring and have put my battery evaluations on hold for a week or so. I thought it might be a good time to interject a bit of past BV humor into the mix. Not all of my projects go quite as planned. When we divided up the various boat chores, some were arbitrarily assigned as blue or pink while others just naturally fell into one of the categories. Just because a job is labeled pink doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do it, however, it’s just that it is usually Marcie’s bailiwick.

A case in point is the laundry, which on Nine of Cups is definitely a pink job. Now that Marcie has been back in the States for a few weeks, I’d re-worn my underwear about as much as I could get away with, and the laundry bag was full. My choices were to go buy more or do the laundry. Now, it isn’t as if I’ve never done my own laundry. I was a bachelor several decades ago, and if memory serves, I did wash my clothes back then. How hard could it be?

I asked around about where the laundromat was and whether anyone could give me a lift. Gillian, a friend of a friend stopped by, and said she’d be happy to give me a ride.

Gillian is a pretty big gal, about 6 feet, 200 pounds, and works as a shipwright at a boatyard a few miles away. I suspect she is probably big and tough enough not to take much guff from her co-workers. We seemed an odd pair as she went off to look for boat parts while I was washing the clothes. We climbed into her 3/4 ton 4WD pickup and headed over to the laundromat. She said she’d be back in an hour or so, which would be perfect.

I separated the light clothes from the dark, added the appropriate amount of soap, inserted my coins, started the wash, and read my Kindle for a half an hour. Other than a colossal waste of time, this didn’t seem too difficult.

Once the wash was done, I loaded it into the dryer, set it to high (cotton) and resumed reading my Kindle. I checked on it about 10 minutes later. There was an odd smell in the air. The clothes were extremely hot. I couldn’t even handle them. So hot, in fact, that two of Marcie’s panties had literally melted to the sides of the dryer. I was pretty sure this wasn’t normal. I turned the temperature down to medium and when I checked again in five minutes, the clothes were only slightly warm. So the blue in me kicked in and I then ran it on hot for two minutes, then on medium for two minutes and so on until they were dry.

Other than that, there was only one other slight problem. Apparently something with ink must have previously been in the dryer (or maybe it was the molten panties), because several of our t-shirts now had what appeared to be small blue ink spots on them. I checked all the pockets and didn’t find anything that could have caused it, and I was careful to put the dark and red clothes in a separate washer from the light colors. It remains a mystery to me.

So now Marcie is low on panties and we’re both low on tee’s. I am convinced that these were mishaps that could have happened to anyone and one shouldn’t lose one’s job over something so minor. On the other hand, if I let Marcie think I’m inept at laundry, she’ll probably never let me do it again. That’s a blue thought, ain’t it?