Dive to clean the boat and Crabbing.
01 March 2009
• Fat Deer Cay, Florida
by Mike
Today was a different sort of day again. We have a weather forecast for strong winds out of the southwest that all the locals were saying were probably going to pass us by, but when we awoke this morning it was obvious that they weren't and in fact might even be a little earlier than originally forecast. They will be caused by a cold front passing through sometime this evening and as a result the winds will veer from southeast to southwest and will pick up from 10 knots to about 20. I am comfortable with our anchorage and the holding that we have with our two anchors so I am not particularly worried but I'll keep an eye on things tonight anyway.
When I took Peri in for his morning "inspection" we had a wee chat with Snoozer and his friend and neighbour Chris about the difference between condominiums in the US and in Canada. Apparently there is no government regulating body down here as there is at home, so if the developer does not live up to the terms of the condo - the wash house doesn't work, the septic system originally designed to pump into the community system trough a contractor has violated the contract and has been cut off, and if there is no insurance on the dock from the condominium association's point of view, there is no governing body like the landlords and tenants association in Canada to complain to. The only thing that you can do is sue the condo association. In short, sue yourself. I'd go nuts with the frustration of it. I would like to get something like this started back in Canada with both dock space for boats and houseboats for people to live in year round. I don't think that you could get a couple of hundred thousand for them like you can here but I think that some folks might pay up to $15K for a dock for their boat for their lifetime plus a "condo" fee, and others who have the same fantasy as I would get a dock for a barge houseboat like the ones that we saw in Key West (a small two story house floating on a barge tied up to a dock, and their boat on the seaward side of that).
Due to the upcoming weather Snoozer and his friends decided to pull their crab pots as they would be unlikely able to do it over the next couple of days, and they allowed me to tag along as photographer and baiter. They have two strings of pots with about 12 in one and 8 in the other and about nine thirty we started hauling and were done by eleven. The pots were all in water less of than ten feet depth so there was no mechanical trap hauler, plus the pots were all set independently rather than strung together like there would have been at home. So Snooze would jockey the boat up alongside a buoy and OT would snag the float with a boat hook and start hauling. In short order the trap would be on the gunnels and they would be peering through the slats to see if "anyone was at home". If there was, even if they were undersized the trap would be opened and the guests evicted and measured for either "keeping" or tossing back into the sea. Crabs are measured by the size of the claw and lobsters by the distance from between the eyes to the back of the body and today although there must have been dozens of lobsters cumulatively in the pots, none of them were "keepers". Of the crabs there were enough to get a whopping eight claws! If the claws are the right size they are cut off with a set of tin snips and the crab is tossed back into the ocean to grow another one the next time that he moults. Many of the potentially good sized crabs in the traps were "butheads" or crabs that someone had already harvested the claws from. Eight claws for a morning's work and the fuel for the boat. They aren't going to get rich that way. My job? I got to re-bait the traps with smelly, stinky, slimy, pigs feet. Yummmmm!
On the way back to Nelleke we came across an iguana swimming across the channel and I was able to get a photo (see photo gallery). This was the first time that we saw one when I actually had the camera with me.
The fellows dropped me off before they went back to the dock with their takings for the day and I came aboard to get ready for my next job for the day. I finally got around to something that lazy ol' me had been procrastinating about for weeks if not months. I went over the side to wash the Jenny Greenteeth fungus off Nelleke's waterline and check the zinc. I suppose part of my hesitation was due to the fact that I was perhaps a little afraid of what I would find down there. My concerns were for naught. The zinc is fine which means that either something else is acting as the sacrificial anode or that I have very little trickle voltage aboard. I prefer to think the latter and since (touch wood) nothing seems to have gone wrong with other equipment that touches water, I have reason to be optimistic. As far as washing down the hull, we really haven't done too badly considering that it have been almost a year of constant immersion, a lot of it in "warm" water, since we last did the bottom. The paint is in good shape even after we scrubbed it off. At a couple of spots on the waterline there was some of the green fungus and below the waterline there are soft growths that will shear off as soon as the boat starts moving again. It certainly came off very easily when I rubbed them with my hand and literally jumped off when I used a brush.
Whee-doggies! We were sitting on the boat resting up after one of our occasional bouts of physical activity when the cold front came through, just like in the CPS Met Course - quick drop in pressure, drop in temperature, wind veers and picks up in strength. Gidyap and ride 'em sailors! The anchors held and the boat is comfortable albeit on a different lay and as we were here we were able to close the hatches to keep the interior dry. It was even preceded by a wee clap of thunder. Made us feel quite at home!
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