Diesel Duck is parked (anchored in 8 ft) on the southeast side of the Melbourne (Florida) Causeway Bridge, protected from the North and Northeast hooley, which is blowing down the Intracoastal Waterway at 20+ knots. There are always chores to do, but today, Sunday, we decided to give it a rest. Yesterday I had made a large casserole dish of lasagna al Forno, so today and tomorrow it will be lasagna time and no cooking on my part is required. Therefore I snuggled up with a book that is with our Reader. This might not be a new thing to you, but electronic books have been creeping on board of cruising boats in the last few years. These days you will find a Kindle, a Sony Reader, a Nook, or the all famous I-Pad on almost every other boat. Yeah, there are still paperbacks being traded in cruiser hangouts, but some of these paperbacks look really bad and you wouldn't want to pick one up in fear of picking up a disease, or the selection is so limited that you already know most of them. We purchased a Sony Reader early last year after the holiday rush and have made good use of it. While cruising anywhere in USA waters or the Virgin Islands area that provide cell phone coverage, we can access the library of the Sony Reader free of charge to download a new book with the Reader device, or use our laptop computer, if we have Wifi access anywhere or in any country, to download a book from the Sony Reader Store and then transfer it to the Reader device via a USB cable. It is a terrific thing because before we bought the Reader while we traveled in foreign countries, we often ran out of reading material. There were no stores to purchase a novel in English and when we found stores that carried some, the selection was very poor and the books were expensive. I remember one time in Ushuaia, Argentina a paperback was priced 22 dollars. Now we can read what we want anywhere. An added benefit is also the light weight and slim format versus holding a book in your hands that is two inches thick. Benno is reading at the moment the complete and uncut novel from Steven King "The Stand", that has 1448 pages in tiny print (which you can enlarge if you want on the Reader.) A reader can hold more than 1000 of these books in its memory and takes no room away, think about of the space you save on a boat.





The evening view from our anchorage over to the Melbourne Causeway Bridge