We Are Back On The Water Again! (almost)

Wow. Wow! WOW!! The last week has been a little like being caught in the middle of a physical and emotional tornado and it isn’t quite over yet. Nov 5 We flew from Toronto to Tampa. Short uneventful. Just a happy, reasonably good-looking , couple from Canada flying to Florida with their luggage. Pretty much like everybody else. Well, not exactly, I am rather confident that nobody else had in their luggage what we had. We checked two giant scuba backpacks full of teak, hardwood flooring, marine plywood, screws, nails, bolts etc. Have to admit that when both bags came off the plane and nothing was seized by customs, we were both pretty surprised. Customs did inspect one of the bags and probably had a good eye roll when they saw what was inside. We rented a minivan at the airport and made our way to our boat’s “mother ship”, the Catalina Factory. Would have liked to have done a tour but the clock was ticking on everything that we had to get accomplished before our launch on the 7th so we settled for picking up a new holding tank (woohoo!!!) and made our way to Fort Pierce to the Harbortown Marina where s/v Soaring Eagles spent the summer sitting in the sun. We drive for what seems to be hours and hours and then … there she was, a little dirtier, teak a little flakier and more sun bleached but inside she was bug free, smelled fine and, aside from one solar connector missing, all was in good shape. We checked in with the marina, then checked into a hotel, and Checked-out fading into a good night sleep. The next few days would be long and exhausting. Multiple trips to the storage locker, to Walmart, to Home Depot, West Marine (they know us by name now), and even a couple of trips to WilDar to pick up four new giant batteries for the boat (that is quite the story) and drop off the old ones, all in 90+ degree temperatures with super high humidity. Come on body, acclimate! The upside, we must have sweated off at least another 5 lbs. Every trip we made meant that a minivan full of boxes and bags and storage bins had to be hauled up onto the boat while she was still on the hard and, well, just stuffed in somewhere. We were launching first thing in the morning on the 7th and, with a tie-up costing $2.50 USD a foot, we wanted to get out of the marina as soon as possible. We were not sticking around to make sure that everything was stowed and “ship-shape” before we left when they were charging those prices. Was it a good idea? Probably not. With all of the work that needed to be done – the holding tank had to be replaced and the giant batteries had to be installed – it might have been better to stay but we left after installing the batteries and spending one more night with air conditioning. Ah the batteries … the giant, humongous, monolithic batteries. Okay, at this point you might be picturing four sky scraping towers of electrical energy. While they might not have seemed that way to anyone but us, they felt that way when we realized that they would not fit into the battery compartment under the bed in the aft cabin. Too tall, too long. Too late to go back to the old batteries because we gave them to the dealer so that we could recoup the core charge. Okay. Let’s figure out what best to do with them. Hmmmmmmmmm. Yikes. Hmmmmmmm. Okay, sit them in the cabin on top of the bed instead of under, connect them, and let’s get out of Fort Pierce. This took a lot longer than we expected and with the condition of the boat we went back to the hotel for one more night of air conditioning, long showers and free breakfast, after one last late-night provisioning run to Walmart. Note: be very careful when shopping at a Walmart Superstore when it is very late and you are very tired or you might end up purchasing a very large ice maker for your boat. Don’t ask me how I know this. 😉