Today we pulled the dingy out of the water to clean the bottom. The St Lucie River is not the cleanest body of water in the world. As we do not have dingy davits we can’t pull the dingy up out of the water easily. Ideally that would be the thing to do each night. There isn’t room for a set of davits on our stern, being we are a canoe ended vessel. Night Light spends her days and nights in the water and lots of nasty grunge builds up on her over time. When we started the job the winds were down and the water calm. That changed as we were working with the wind picking up considerably. To clean the bottom requires emptying the dingy of all its gear, taking the motor off and hoisting it up on the rail, then pulling the dingy up with a halyard. She hangs off the side of the boat and we go at the grunge with water, scrub brush, Krud Kutter, scrubbies and scrapers. It isn’t one of our favorite jobs so we tend to procrastinate about doing it. She’s been in the water 20 days and the build up was gross. We chased her around a bit in the building winds which added to the challenge and managed to get her reasonably clean. No pressure hose out on the mooring ball so the work is done by hand and it is messy!
Yesterday I put the first coat of teak oil on the bright work. I have never figured out why it’s called that because it requires no brains to do it. And makes me wonder how bright we were buying a boat with this much teak. I was hoping to get another coat on today but the winds are howling and after cleaning the dingy bottom my ambition is lagging. Going to be an interesting ride in for showers.
Thursday was the Captain’s birthday. We celebrated with a dinner of Beef Wellington and a bottle of red wine. It’s a pretty involved recipe especially in a small galley. Turned out, it wasn’t a bad recipe to make on the boat. Although I did cheat and use store bought puff pastry, I was pleased with the result. The Captain was delighted and there weren’t any leftovers LOL.
We’ve decided to stay in Stuart until past the holidays. We really love this area. Stuart is a hard town to beat with its river walk and myriad of shops and restaurants. The Marina can’t do enough for you and the facilities are terrific. And we can get wifi on the mooring here! It’s hard to find a reason to leave. A plus to this is we will be here when our part for the dingy motor arrives.
This will mean if or when we head down to the keys we’ll have to wait for a mooring to free up in Marathon. We may have had to anyway even if we left this week. They tend to fill up before the holidays. I will be shocked if we don’t end up on the hook for a while when we get there.
Since we decided to stay we have decorated for the holidays. Scott put lights on the bow and bimini and I decorated down below. The picture shows our tree and stockings.