currently in:  Fort Myers, FL

Somebody once said (and I'd Google who it was if I had a better net connection!) that there are no strangers - just friends he hadn't met yet. That's an apt description of life on a cruising boat, too; one of the things we love about the lifestyle is that we are part of this amorphous social blob of "boat people", who are by and large pretty wonderful people who are always willing to help others out.

Down the dock from us are Jar and Bruce on Pegasus II, a big Gulfstar motorsailer. When I mentioned to Jar that we needed to rent a car to retrieve our RV from Glades Boat Storage, she offered to drive us out instead, which was awfully nice considering that it's about an hour each way. So we all took a Sunday drive out to the boat yard, and now we have our RV. It's useful for shopping and other errands (we are, of course, spending like sailors), but hopefully we'll have it sold before we leave here. (Anyone want to buy an RV?)

Then the other day, we had a pleasant visit from Marilyn and Jim Anderson who also have a Caliber 40 (but older than ours and not the LRC model with super-humongo-tankage), Summer Wind. Their boat's at a dock in Key Largo; they drove over three hours to come visit us! I'd actually been corresponding with Marilyn quite a bit over the past several years as they read our weblog - and let me just say that we always love meeting people who know us through the website, so if you are at all on our route or even plan to be on vacation in the area, don't be shy, drop us a line. (Our email address is in the sidebar menu; you can also comment to this blog, and it will be emailed to us. Comments on the lj feed don't get emailed to us, but while we have net access I am checking it every once in a while. I won't be able to do that, though, when we're in the Bahamas.) The Andersons brought us lovely Christmas prezzies (and may I say that Illinois wine is surprisingly tasty?  Yep, we've already tapped the bottle!), politely averted their eyes from the mess that is a cruising boat in full recommissioning mode, and took us out to lunch. Jim promised to send us some old charts and other info about the Keys. Since the Keys are their stomping ground they were full of suggestions and advice, and hopefully when we are down in that area we'll get them to lead us around and show us all the good stuff. And maybe we'll lure them to the Bahamas with us. It's always fun traveling with others, and it would be cool to travel with a "sistership" - make people think they're seeing double!

The people who work at the marina here have been helpful and friendly, as have the folks at the office which handles city parking permits. But for service above and beyond, I have to say that a fellow named John Drake really deserves accolades. He runs a business called Solar Seller (website www.solarseller.com) and he was one of the people I called trying to locate a replacement for the solar panel that was shattered when our wind generator fell off in Blanquilla. I'd been making phone calls all afternoon; when our original vendor told us that this model had been discontinued, I called the company (Siemens Solar, which is now Shell Solar) and was given a list of distributors, all of whom came up blank but suggested particular dealers to call. Alas, nobody had any left, and all the currently manufactured solar panels are squarish rather than long and skinny - it would be best for us, of course, to be able to pop an identical panel into the existing bracket, but we could probably deal with a similarly shaped one. One distributor gave me John's number, saying, "He stocks all sorts of weird stuff." I left a message and about an hour later, John called me back saying that although he no longer sold solar panels, he'd located someone selling exactly the model we're after - never used - on Ebay! He gave me the item number; I checked it out, bought one (for about 2/3 what we paid originally), and it's supposed to arrive tomorrow. Yay! I never would have thought to look on Ebay, and with our slow connection it would have been difficult to find through searching (plus it was listed under the original manufacturer, Arco, rather than Siemens). So because John was so helpful in a situation where he wasn't even making any money from the deal, I'm giving him a plug here.

Anyway, we're slowly settling into the "community" of the Fort Myers Yacht Basin, and know several people (and two dogs and a cat) by name. We also got our single-sideband radio (SSB) going again, and amazingly enough managed to check in to the Cruiseheimer's Net - we'd noticed our copper foil running to the arch, which we use as counterpoise, had corroded through, but we still had a strong enough signal to be heard by net control, who that day was in the Bahamas (and who, much to our gratification and surprise, had been reading a saved copy of our old weblogs just the previous night). The radio nets have been a mainstay of our cruising life, and although most of the boat names we heard were unfamiliar, we recognized several from our previous voyages. We chatted briefly with Neal on Rhapsody, whom we spent quite a bit of time with on the east coast and in the Bahamas our second year; hopefully we'll catch up with each other in person in the Bahamas in a month or so. And even though most of this season's crop of cruisers are just boat names on the radio to us now, eventually we'll catch up to them as well - after all, they're just friends we haven't met yet.