The cruiser's net, that is! Here in Boot Key Harbor, Marathon "where mooring is a ball," everything is set up to make it easy to live on the boat on a mooring. When you arrive, you find out when your scheduled weekly pumpout is. Additional putouts can be scheduled for a small fee. There is a daily cruiser's net on VHF 68 to help boaters get to know each other, help each other with problems, buy, sell, and trade items, and even stump the harbor with a trivia question. We have been saved by the net already.

On Sunday, we motored out to one of the places boats can moor on a reef in order to snorkel or scuba. We had a good time snorkeling, although I was unsuccessful at taking pictures. We have a housing for our camera just for taking underwater photos, but apparently the camera turned itself off, so none of the pictures I tried to take actually created images. We saw, among other things, parrot fish, sergeant major fish, yellow tail snappers, barracudas, and three kinds of angel fish.

Upon returning to our mooring here, we realized that this was the first time since we left Nova Scotia that we came back to the same place (dock or mooring) that we left from. Then we noticed that the batteries were no more charged than when we'd left. This is unusual because normally the batteries charge when we run the motor, and we were counting on this little jaunt to charge them up. Colin checked out a couple of things and thinks it may be the regulator, but as he had to leave on another business trip, we won't be able to fix it until he returns.

So what what to do in the mean time? The options seemed to be: beg, borrow, buy, or rent a generator or move to a slip with shore power. So we got on the cruiser's net and asked if anyone had a generator to sell. (I bet you thought I'd forgotten about being saved by the net.) Sure enough, someone had just upgraded to a bigger generator and was selling one just right for us at a reasonable price. So now we run our little generator daily to charge the batteries (just like most of the boats here). It's actually much nicer (quieter and cooler) than running the engine to charge the batteries, so I'm glad we've got the generator. We'll have to decide whether to find a place to stow it or sell it when we leave.

Last night Leslie, Evelyn, and I went to the Meet and Greet pot luck dinner run by the cruiser's net folks. Quite an extensive spread and we met nice people at our table.

The picture is Evelyn and Leslie heading off in the kayak (which they now use like a canoe - sort of) to find a geocache that was hanging from a mangrove up a creek near our mooring.