Sunday 19th November

Miami


Another slow start to the day due to the night interruption. Gerry decided that today was to be his ”fixing” minor irritating things whilst I was going to catch up with typing this blog – ready for when I have an internet connection and can upload it.
Bob and Kathy have taken off for a sail and then they are going into a marina for the night. We intend staying put for a day or 2 more, the weather window just isn’t happening as yet so we are again doing the hurry up and wait thing.
Gerry started off with the snubbers on the anchor, changing them out for a much bigger line with more stretch. After which he took the windlass foot switch cover off and sprayed WD40 on the switch to make it operate better (it was temperamental before)
Then it was on to the rigging system for lifting the dink up onto the davits, we had decided yesterday that it was quite a difficult system to use as one of the blocks had a ratchet which only operates one way. The fix was to remove the ratchet from the block which Gerry has now done – hopefully lifting the dink will be much easier now. The last “fix” was to try out a new bracing system for the dink. This is intended to hold the dink in place when we have it on the davits and are moving along in the Caribbean (we keep it on the foredeck when we are undertaking a sea passage); from what we can tell at the moment it should work just fine. Once all the “fixing” for the day was done we took the dink out for a blast around the shoreline. Taking it under the Rickenbacker Causeway was an interesting moment as there were loads of people fishing off the old causeway so we had to be careful not to get tangled up in any of their lines – I’m sure they would have been a bit miffed with us if they had “caught” our dink! It was a lovely day which translated to lots of people on the water operating all sorts of water craft, we got fed up of being rocked about by the speed freaks on sea-doos, etc. and headed back to the boat (where we were rocked by speed freaks in super cigar boats – they really move). Gerry stayed below deck to “watch the football on TV”, I actually found him studying the backs of his eyelids a bit later on. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading my book. Finally we managed a night without the noise from shore.