currently in: Fort Myers, FL

Yay, we're on the water again! We got splashed Tuesday afternoon and spent the evening ferrying things from the RV to the boat. Wednesday morning we rolled out of bed, put on many layers of clothes (a cold front's come through and it's icy-cold, at least by Florida standards - below 40 degrees overnight, although the sun's out and warming things up), fired up the engine, dropped the dock lines, and motored off down the river. We swapped turns behind the wheel, each of us driving until we got chilled and then going below where it was nice and toasty, due to our heater system distributing engine heat around the cabin.

Our first test as sailors (well, as boaters; we, um, haven't actually attached the sails yet!) we failed miserably, as at the Ortona Lock just a few miles down the canal I wasn't in a good position to tie to the wall, and then missed the stern line thrown to me by the canal worker, and Windom's stern swung away. I then backed up with too much throttle and nearly hit the other side of the lock! Argh. Finally we got lined up, with much work. It was a small consolation to see the tugboat behind us also have problems with his stern swinging away from the tie-up wall. But it reminded me that we will need to relearn all the little techniques of boat handling.

At Franklin Lock we tied to the south wall, which made things much easier as I just slid alongside and allowed the north wind to blow us into position. It then blew Britt's hat off, so after we were dropped a few feet and cleared to leave the lock, we pushed off from the lock wall and smartly executed a Hat Overboard maneuver. I drove slowly up to the bobbing white object, with Britt giving me directions once I could no longer see it - then he scooped it out with our long-handled net. (Hey, this was useful practice!)

By the time we passed through the final drawbridge we were feeling as though we'd eased back into the boating routine. But we knew we had two more big tasks ahead of us. The first was to pass under several 55-foot fixed bridges between us and the Fort Myers Marina. This task sounds a lot less trivial when you realize that our mast height is 56 and a half feet! That doesn't even count the junk at the top, a VHF antenna and a wind indicator and a lightning brush, so we're probably more like 57 feet.

We'd done this going the other way, so we knew the drill. Just before the first of the bridges, we anchored. First we moved all our movable gear over to the port side (that's the left, facing forward, for all you landlubbers) which gave us a tilt of about 4 degrees. Then we filled our empty gasoline jugs with river water and hung them from the end of our boom, which we supported using two halyards from the top of the mast. Our two dead engine batteries, about 60 pounds each, joined them. We tied a few buckets of water among them, and then swung the boom out far to the side. This gave us a total of about 10 degrees, so Britt slid the dinghy out and tied that to the end of the boom as well, filled with river water. Unfortunately the boom was so low at that point that the dink still rested on the water, but some of its weight acted on the boom and pulled us a little further over.

We didn't get quite the lean that we had on the way up, but we had two advantages this go-round; the low tide was lower than it had been when we'd done it before, and the north wind acted to "blow the water out" of the river, making for an exceptionally low tide. The clearance board read 56' and we easily cleared our bridges; we motored between mud flats down the channel and anchored just outside the Fort Myers Yacht Basin to undo our tilting gear.

When we were mostly put to rights, I called the Yacht Basin on VHF to tell them we were coming in. We have reservations for a month; we figure we've got two or three weeks of work to do on Windom to get shipshape again, and the monthly rate is a better deal than the daily rate for anything over about a week. It's a nifty location, right downtown, although we'll need to do the tilty thing again to get out as there are three more 55' bridges to go.

Docking at a marina makes me a little nervous at the best of times, since we don't really do it enough to get in practice - and of course we've been out of practice for over two years! With a north wind blowing better than 20 knots I was really not looking forward to the fine maneuvering that would keep us from hitting the concrete pier. But I eased in slowly, staying to the upwind side, nosed in by the stern piling as Britt slipped a dockline over it, and then...stopped.

We'd run aground halfway into the slip!

The marina worker who was there to take our bow lines assured us it was just soft silt down there, and that I should power forward - and let me tell you, it's an eerie feeling giving a boat full throttle ten feet from a concrete pier. But we squooshed through the bottom (so much for our new coat of bottom paint!) and slid gently into our new temporary home. The grounding was, of course, due to the unusually low tide.

So here we are. Lots of work to do! But gosh, it's nice to be floating again. Boats belong in the water, and this one is happy to be wet again.