I awoke this morning in a much better frame of mind that when I thumbed those few notes last night. Much of the new me mindset is due to the Eau Gallie Yacht Basin Marina and the people who keep their boats here. At the pot luck they kindly invited us to we had everything from hamburgers to mushroom pilaff, from hot dogs to shrimp, and assorted salads in between. Plus everyone made a point to come over to speak to us and make us feel welcome. One of them was a Southeast Airlines pilot so PFP would have felt right at home. They could have exchanged stories.

This place is astounding. I had a look around this morning in the daylight and in a calmer frame of mind and it is surprisingly spacious. There are two marinas here and at the one we are staying in, Nelleke is one of the smaller boats. The very narrow entrance channel carries 6' right in to the docks. When I say narrow I mean emaciated. There wouldn't be room for two boats to pass each other in it but once you get in it opens into a fairly large basin about the size of three or four football fields with two marinas on the north and west edges. There is even anchoring in the middle which is supposed limited to be a 72 hours, but the four boats that are out there now look like they are there for wet storage and have been for a while. We have passed this place a half dozen times in the past and never even realized it was here. It one of the old fashioned ones with well worn but functional equipment and docks, space for 65 boats, wifi if you're close enough to the server to pick it up, commercial grade washer and drier, all the normal stuff just housed in a spot that's a little worn. Karen, the lady who manages the place, is very nice and accommodating and as I implied yesterday there is an aura of family about the members or at the very least, really good friends. It is relatively inexpensive so there are several folks that live aboard and several more who have their older boats here while they work on them. There is a beautiful 46' Nordhaven tied up just in front of a 70' double ended schooner that has so much barnacle growth on her hull below the waterline I remember the scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean aboard the Flying Dutchman where the crew condemned to sail on her for a term committed to Davy Jones would chant, "Part of the ship, part of the crew. Part of the crew, part of the ship!", as they slowly became incorporated into the fabric of the vessel.

Early in the morning before even 0800 I had some good news. I had fixed the anchor! Turns our that rust was not after all the culprit. Rather, the lead of chain had somehow gotten trapped under a number of flakes of itself and when the windlass was deploying it couldn't pull itself out from under itself. Weird, eh? I had to pry it loose link by link with a screwdriver and then we deployed the whole thing into the lagoon here just to completely test it. Had to be done but there was a price, the bottom of the basin here is pretty much a mayonnaise of soft, smelly, oozy, stinking mud. Did I mention that it was rank? So, of course at the end of the exercise the foredeck was covered in it which led to job number 2 - cleaning the deck.

Barb tidied up a bit in the cockpit and looked around for the tree frog but we are beginning to suspect that he has jumped ship. I certainly hope so and not just flushed out one of the scuppers in the parade of squalls yesterday. Perhaps he could tell we were tied up next to shore and he went hop to the deck, hop to the toe rail, and hop to one of the pilings and then along the dock to the security of the grass and trees. Good luck to you little frog, and watch out for cranes and storks. (From Barb - I love how my one hour scrubbing of the cockpit and some of the decking turned into "tidied up a bit" LOL).

We took a walk into the business district of Eau Gallie looking for a pharmacy. Barb and I are both in need of electrolyte replenishment and neither of us are particularly fond of Gatoraid, so we were hoping to find a drug store that could sell us some sort of pill supplement. Strange, although, I suppose, not unexpected, the downtown area is all restaurants and art galleries with the one lonely hardware store thrown in. There was a building that at one time had contained a Walgreens but it has been long deserted. We had a coffee in a Starbucks and asked the barista where the nearest drugstore was to be found and was told it was a 2-3 mile stroll along Hwy 1. Gee! Nifty! What about those of us on foot? What about this heat?

Back at the boat we began sorting out all of the totes we had aboard containing everything imaginable. We sorted everything into what we wanted on he boat, what we were going to take home, what we were going to donate to anyone who wanted it, and what was so crappy we would just junk it. We had a dozen memory sticks, eight USB cables, a number of USB to RS-232 converters and a number of other converters. We also uncovered the missing handheld VHF radio! Geese!

After having experienced this heat now for over three weeks, Barb and I have come to a very profound conclusion. God screwed up! Sweating is supposed to cool you off, to keep your body temperature in a healthy range; well, I'm sorry, but it doesn't work. We are both sweating gumdrops and don't feel any cooler so it's a basic design flaw. Wait a moment. Maybe it does work and if we weren't sweating we would both feel a lot worse. Sorry, God.