Marathon Marina
30 March 2022
• Safe Harbor Marathon Marina
by Penni Singleton • Windy, getting windier
Safely and happily holed up in the marina until Friday when the windy weather is due to abate. It is a great marina with friendly neighbors, a stunning pool and a choice of restaurants close by. We were lucky yesterday as we found a restaurant across the road that looked a little basic. Old Style Keys, we have been told. The staff welcomed us with humor and an informality that made us feel like regular customers who had been away too long. The food was all freshly made and great value. My tuna salad was so huge I had enough for today too. So now you know what I had for lunch. It seemed like a lazy morning, but we were hard at work researching the next leg of our adventure - The Bahamas. We bought the Explorer charts last week that everyone has recommended. John has established that our best route will be from the Key Largo area to Bimini. This route is about fifty miles and gives us the best use of the Gulf Stream. Apparently the Gulf Stream adds a couple of knots of speed and will sweep us North. That's the plan at the moment anyway. With that established, I worked on applying for Timmy's custom papers. We hope we will get them in a few days, but it could take a couple of weeks. We also discussed what else we need for the boat. The biggest decision is whether to buy an engine for the dinghy or to continue to rely on the oars. An engine is something else to maintain, we would have to register the boat, and no engine is perfect. A battery powered engine is quiet but the battery has to be charged. A water cooled engine uses gas and is noisy. We decided we needed a little more time to mull that over. We will need extra fuel, and a lot of drinking water, but we plan to stay in marinas a fair amount of time too. The marinas don't appear to be more expensive than here, but the food, we are told, is a lot more. We will take as many staples a Solitude can hold and make it work. We are hoping to stay in the Bahamas for around four weeks - enough time to give us a taste, but not so long that we risk getting stuck there when hurricane season starts up mid May. We headed to the pool this afternoon and stayed for a couple of hours. We swam when we had the pool to ourselves, then had drinks as some 'neighbors' joined us and we chatted until we were wrinkly. Timmy then took us for a long walk so we paid for abandoning him.
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