We had Chris from OCD divers scheduled to clean Light Reaches bottom today. In the warm water with all the critters that abound in it LIght Reach's bottom develops quite a layer of yucky scum, creatures and nastiness. This kind of yuck can mess up your prop and really slow you down when you are underway. Since the plan is to leave at the next available weather window we got on Chris' schedule. He came out and did a splendid job of removing all the crud on LR's bottom. It took well over an hour to remove all the freeloaders but with the job done we should travel faster to our next destination. Chris is a great guy, told us our zinc which we replaced last month was starting to show wear already. The zinc or sacrificial is used to protect the prop and thru hulls on the boat from galvanic corrosion. I won't go into all the details of how that works you can find it on wikipedia lest your eyes glaze over from talk about anodes and cathodes OH MY.
Speaking of weather windows.... we had hoped to leave tomorrow, but Mother Nature has other plans there is a hybrid tropical storm system brewing out there. We haven't seen a lot of rain yet but it has been blowing like stink and it is cloudy. It has been a "Nancy Ride" (which translates to wet) in and out in the dinghy. At some points we had whitecaps in the harbor. It makes for a swirly twirly kind of day and night. Since we did have to go in we took the pull behind cart and headed to the market for some provisions. With us not leaving as originally intended we will go through our fresh produce relatively fast and we were already out of fresh spinach for salads. On the way to the market we stopped at the appropriately named Hurricane Restaurant for a bit of lunch and a break from the bouncing and wind. Even walking we were getting slammed with the wind in our face. The Hurricane is one of those dive kind of bar restaurants that has good food at a reasonable price. Scott had some hamburger concoction that was buried in cheese and bacon how could it possibly be bad!! I had a BLT since the fish was tilapia and I knew that wasn't fresh. After our repast we headed down to Publix to get milk and bread, hey there is a storm coming! Some things never change regardless of where you live. As usual the store was crowded and they were out of fat free milk. Ha we weren't the only ones stocking up. We trucked our groceries back to the Marina, yowsa walking again, we missed the car but after that lunch the walk was needed. We hit the showers before we headed back to the boat where the CSO was frantically awaiting our return. I really need to do a video of her antics when we get back to the boat after being gone for a short while. You would think we were torturing her the noises she makes she gets so excited. We put our provisions away putzed around a bit reading and I watched the latest episode of Mr. Selfridge. The Captain took India in for evening shore leave and we settled in for the evening. The wind was still blowing like crazy when we headed off to bed.
Paul to answer your question the current plan is to put Light Reach in is Murelle Marina. Not fancy but they do have the capability of hauling Light Reach out should we need to do so if a storm is coming. It is a working yard not a resort Marina and you can work on your own boat there. That is something that is getting harder to find these days.
The picture is of Chris getting ready to dive down and clean Light Reach's bottom.