We had only a few weeks left after returning to Key Largo, but they were great weeks. We kept sailing out to the reefs and diving. Early in our stay at Key Largo, there were lots of days when the sea was way too rough to dive. Now, in May, the seas ranged from dead calm to 1' to 2'.

The diving was a lot of fun. Merry bought me a new SCUBAPRO BC for my birthday. Now we both have truly excellent SCUBA equipment. After going a month without seeing any sharks, one day Merry saw three nurse sharks on one dive. The water temperature was now in the low 80s, so our "cool water" 5mm wetsuits went into the bottom of the locker, replaced by our 3/2mm "warm water" suits. One day, I "free dove" to 30' and watched a SCUBA student and instructor kneeling in the sand, doing a skills test. On a dive on Molasses reef, we experienced the strongest current we ever encountered while diving. We are trained to always swim into the current at the start of a dive. We kicked hard and used 2,000 PSI of air (we carry 3,000) going up current, and then turned back on the reciprocal compass course, and "flew" like superman, as the current carried us across the bottom until we looked up to see the hull of our boat. After we boarded les Miserables and got our ear off, we saw three divers from one of the dive boats, on the surface clinging to the last mooring buoy "down current" on the reef, waving for help. Before we needed to do anything the dive boat moved to that mooring and "picked them up".

After one day of diving, I had one of my least favorite, and Merry her favorite experience of our stay at Key Largo. We sailed north to elbow Reef, further from the Key Largo canal than we had ever done before. We did two dives, but didn't start the second one until 4:30 pm. By the time we got back near the canal entrance, it was "stone dark." It is really different coming into that very narrow canal entrance at night. Of course, "Fernando" our GPS chart plotter shows us where we are, and where to go - but it still "whit knuckle time". We almost hit one of the channel day marks that are not lit - Merry, up at the bow, yelled, "turn to starboard! Now!" and we missed it by maybe three feet. There was a green light, which I thought marked the north side of the canal, which turned out to be a house, 200' from the channel. The canal is only about 100' wide, and has a concrete ledge on the south bank that sticks out maybe five feet, just 3 or 4 feet underwater. There is a big boat moored on the north side at the entrance, making for a tight passage even in broad daylight. To top it off, it was very shallow at low tide - our keel clears by mere inches - and this was low tide. We made it, but it was very tense. I talked to one of the commercial dive boat captains about this later, and he said that even he hates coming in the canal at night. After we were on the canal, it was still hard to see, so Merry used a dive light up in the bow to pick out moored boats, and turn at 'crash corner'. While she was doing this, a wonderful thing happened. A dolphin had followed us into the canal and appeared at the bow, swimming back and forth with us as went up the canal. At one point the dolphin rolled over his side and was looking up at Merry and then rolling onto his other side to repeat this "connection". Merry was laughing in delight - while I was still tensely clutching the wheel.

Our best dives were on Memorial Day weekend. We were on a mooring at Mollasses Key, and heard someone call to us - it was our friends, the Barkely's who had moved to Vero Beach from Illinois. Ron swam and Mavis paddled sitting in an inner tube, over to our boat to say hi.

Then it was time to head home. We decided to leave in the late after at half-tide rising and sail north to Carysfort reef, and spend the night on a dive mooring. This worked pretty well, but there was a 2-34 ' sea running and the boat "rocked and rolled " at the mooring all night. We left the mooring and went out into the Atlantic and then hoisted the main, unfurled the jib, shut down the engine and had a terrific sail all the way to Fort Lauderdale, going 6 knots some of the time. At one point, we were hit on the beam by a 5-foot wave, which caused our coffee pot to be thrown across the cabin covering the deck below with coffee grounds - ugh.

The only other unhappy event of our entire trip home occurred when we docked at the municipal marina at Fort Lauderdale - Los Olas Marina. There is a foundational rule when it comes to docking a sailboat NEVER DOCK WITH THE WIND OR CURRENT BEHIND THE BOAT, PUSHING YOU INTO THE DOCK. The tide was coming in, pushing the boat toward the marina docks. We could have gone to a mooring ball, across the river from the marina, but then we would have the inconvenience of having to use the dinghy to get to the marina building, showers, etc. There is a bridge that crossed the river in the middle of the marina, dividing it in half; we could have waited for the bridge to open and then docked into the current. Merry said that was what we should do. But, I thought we would be able to slow the boat by going hard astern, and dock okay. It didn't' work. As soon as we turned into the marina's fairway, now beam on to the current the boat began moving sideways toward the finger docks. We almost hit the stern of a boat, and then did hit the end of the dock at the slip we were trying to get into. We ended up with the boat trapped diagonally across two slips, with Merry jumping onto the dock with a bowline. It took a lot of hard hauling on lines to het the boat straightened out in her slip. It turned out that we did not do any damage, except to my ego!

The rest was easy. We spent a couple nights at the marina and having fun in Fort Lauderdale, and then left before dawn, at slack tide (no current!) down the river to the inlet and out into the Atlantic for a great sail to Lake Worth/Palm Beach. We got into the Gulf Stream, and at one point were doing eight knots! We stayed at Old Port Cove again, and from there voyaged up the ICW to Peck Lake, and from there to Indiantown.

After the usual hard work, getting a rental truck, loading everything from the boat into it, buffing out and waxing the hull, etc. , we said goodbye to our friends at the Indiantown Marina, and drove the truck back to Geneva, Illinois - stopping to see Merry's father and his wife Pat along the way.

We had six months of not really doing much of anything, (diving, reading, relaxing, swimming, going to tourist sites and best of all time with our kids - in the Keys and at home) -it still seemed like "time well spent". Go figure.