Headed back to the cold country

It's been kind of a long day. We were anchored out in Manatee Bay near Key Largo and our plans called for heading back to Manatee Boat Yard. We're going to leave the boat on the dock while we return to ND for Christmas and to take care of some committments in January. When we got to the boat yard, we wanted to have the holding tank pumped before leaving it for awhile. The pump out didn't work, so they promised they'd do it while we are gone. After getting tied up we went to get the art work for the hailing port for the back of the boat. One attempt was made by our broker before we put the boat in the water and that was unsuccessful. This time I had my artist wife use her magic and as you can see, it is now the only boat in the boat yard from Bismarck, ND

Now we have the unpleasant task of packing and semi cleaning the cupboards out. This will be minor compared to what we had to do when we first got here. We probably won't get a real early start tomorrow, since we have a couple of things to do and we don't want to hit the Miami traffic going to work. I hope I can get back to the blog while we're home, but if not I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. We feel pretty confident that 2012 is going to be better than 2011.

We have Gemini Neighbors

Weather partly cloudy, wind 16 kts, temperature high of 78. Next door we have neighbors on a Gemini Catamaran like ours. It's a little older model, but you have to look closely to see the differences. I've had a chance to talk with them a little to see if they can answer some of the questions that I have. We solved one mystery about a toggle switch, but I still have one switch that baffels everyone. So we have a Gemini next door and in front of us we have a 105' motor yacht. The people on the Gemini invited me onboard. the people on the 105' did not. Hummmm maybe it's my deodorant.

Picture of our first meal on board. We've had several since, but the food was good and the wine was a good year, 2010.

Yesterday we went back into Barnes Sound to try the sailing systems again. We put up a little more sail even though we had more wind than the last time we sailed. Everything went well. I'm trying to get Marilyn to operate the wheel so that I can do most of the physical sail handling. It's going OK, but she still doesn't have confidence in herself, so she becomes a little anxious. We've talked about it and I'm sure things will get better as we use the boat more. We returned to the marina and decided to try docking without calling for line assistance. We know that at some point, we need to be self sufficient. It was interesting. I still don't have a good feel for how the boat responds, so the first time, we blew it. Had to back away and try again. This started a series of touch and go sessions with the boat and the dock. That's what I tell anyone that might have been watching us. It actually took us 4 tries to finally get where we needed to be in order to get our lines in place. Fortunately, there wasn't much wind so we could come and go without much problem at all. The good thing is that we never yelled at each other the whole time. Now that's progress.