All good things must come to an end they say, and today is the day that we finally pack up and depart from Bonefish Bay and say good-bye to Snoozer and his friends at Coco Plum Yacht Club Dock-o-minium. This had been a very pleasant spot to be stuck, if you must be stuck, and Snoozer and his pals have been very gracious as hosts. We came hoping to stay for maybe a week while we got the bits and pieces to replace the windlass and chain rode and have ended up staying for nearly a month! I know that there are one or two more officious persons at the dock who object to Snooze having friends that come that long, particularly ones that walk their dog along the driveway and put garbage into the dumpster. Snooze resolved the latter by simply putting our garbage in with his own and challenging the officious one to dumpster dive to prove otherwise. Fortunately this fellow was very much a minority, in fact, from what I can tell, there are very few people in the dock-o-minium that have any time or respect for him at all unless they need him for something.

There was a small adventure yesterday, as an example, when there has been one other individual who has consistently been doing major work on his boat, which is a violation of the rules of the place, waking people up in the early hours, putting paint and fibreglass duct all over his neighbours and in the water. Apparently he had the support of the officious one in doing this. One of his few friends, I guess. After trying to resolve it pleasantly for some weeks and having it simply ignored, it took a call to the EPA or Environmental Protection Agency to make an impression on the guy doing the repairs and to get the officious one to do his job without favouritism. They were worried about other environmental issues at the dock-o-minium that would be uncovered by a visit from the real official.

Too bad that it has to come to this sort of thing in a place that should, and could, be perfect. Anyway, when you compare it to the fact that it is a really nice anchorage for us, a short walk from a very nice beach, close to our friend Snooze's dock and it's free! Well, from our point of view it's been great.

According to my best research, the time for us to leave will be at about four o'clock this afternoon, so this morning we spent our time getting the boat ready for sea. It's amazing how much stuff comes out of storage once you put down roots even for a short while. It all had to go back into its hidey-hole where it wouldn't tacit into its head to fly about in a seaway. We then brought up the two anchors and cleaned them off and stowed them and motored slowly over to Snooze's dock where we tied off across the back of his pier on the pilings to take on water, pump out the holding tank, clean off the boat and wait for the tide.

Woah! Boy did I screw that up. Turns out that I tides based on the Gulf Coast rather than the atlantic coast so I was 180 degrees out of phase with what we needed. So that high tide is at 11 o'clock and we got into a mad flurry of action. We made the tide but as we were progressing outside to anchor we were towing the dingy from the starboard davit and the pressure snapped one of the turnbuckle hold downs that I had installed. It was only intended as a temporary fix, but over time it had become one of those permanent temporary things so naturally under the action of some heavy seas, it broke. Those same heavy seas made it difficult to anchor and even more difficult to raise the dingy so we decided to head back into Bonefish Bay and head out tomorrow with everything properly stowed. Tomorrow we'll leave at about the same time maybe a little later so everything has been set back 24 hours.

Barb has decided that maybe we should head for Fort Lauderdale rather than Miami to make a little better time and get to Coco Beach to meet up with our old compatriot Paul. If we don't get there in time so be it but at least we will have tried. I myself am getting more and more anxious to escape the summer that is fast approaching us here in the keys. Today was swealtering!

I'm not sure if we'll have a wifi connect where we plan to stop in Biscayne Bay so it may be a day or so before our next post. Patience, please and we'll let you know how the trip up the coast went.