So while you've all been tending to business, to your other passions and to family, we've been do'in a little sailing outside and lots of powering inside. Argg, the ICW is on one hand a marvelous achievement, I sure it wasn't created just for sailors and power boaters but more for barges and commercial stuff. But, there's not much commercial stuff that I can see and creating this inland water has created miles and miles of new found waterfront properties. For those of you who haven't done the ICW just imagine driving down one of the more affluent streets in you town and commenting on just how big and beautiful the houses are. Now transpose your street to the ICW, hundreds of miles of American homes on the water with their docks, their boats lifted out of the water, their adirandac chairs in multi-colors, their flags flying and their manicured lawns. I thought Florida was affluent, no way, America, along the ICW, is affluent based on my very small sampling and limited observations. So isn't this fantastic, you go America!! And thank you for creating this marvelous waterway... however as a sailor I have to admit I'm out of my element powering up the ICW.

Here's a sampling, Alice is reading the cruising guide checking out the waterway ahead of us. Uh Oh shoaling, water depths at low water to less than six feet, Ouch!! So I mark the spots on the chart plotter and continue on. As we approach I slow the boat, the depth alarm is annoyingly going off every couple of seconds, slow her even more, then with the wind on our nose and the current behind us we proceed into uncertainty. The water color is "brown", not like the crystal clear stuff of the Caribbean so we can't judge depths visually, it's all feely touchy, and hopefully not the bouncy-on-the-bottom stuff; that really sucks. So I got tied of the alarm going off at eleven feet and changed it to ten, then to nine, so less buzzing but when it does I have to act. So that's the ICW for us a six and one half foot sailboat with a very cautious captain. As an aside, when a power boats goes by us and then accelerates back to plain, they sturr up the water so much our depth sound goes berzerk, first 189 feet then 1.9 feet, ah the joys of the ICW.

Alice is studying the state's capitals. Do you know the capital of South Dokota or Nevada or Orgegon? I thought it would be a piece of cake, nope, you try it see how many you realy know without cheating.