currently in:  beautiful downtown Fort Myers. Still.

The reason I haven't been writing much isn't because we're not doing much - I'm sure you're all dying to hear about the exciting details of our line-laundering expedition, our teak restoration, and the installation of a new anchor washdown pump - but because by the end of the day we are both too beat to do anything other than fall into bed. This becomes a pattern. of course - we end up asleep by 9:30 and therefore wake well before dawn, so naturally we might as well get up and start working, and then we can cram way more work into the day, so by the time we eat dinner we're dead tired. Lather, rinse, repeat. The one exception was New Year's Eve when we walked the few blocks to downtown, which was closed off for a big street party. We ate dinner in a restaurant, watched all the silly people walking around with flashing light jewelry, listened to the three bands (one on each end of the big T of closed-off streets) for about two songs each, and then went back to the boat at a daringly-late ten p.m. Aren't we the late-night partiers!

We did our big provisioning run on Sunday evening, which meant that Sunday night was another late one, as packing the food we bought took as long as buying it - and we still had things to pack the next morning! Shopping for several months is a weird experience, as your brain tells you you can't possibly use four big cannisters of rolled oats, or five boxes of Wheat Thins. But rolled oats and Wheat Thins are two of our staples that are woefully pricy in the Bahamas, so into the cart they went - along with four pounds of raisins, three bottles of real maple syrup (and two of fake), three bottles of barbecue sauce, fourteen cans of Ranch Style Baked Beans, ten pounds of whole-wheat flour...

It took us two dock-carts (here they have these big Rubbermaid wheel-barrow thingies) to get it all here and to our cockpit. Then we had to stow it. Fortunately, Britt is an expert at packing stuff. He used to pack horses for trips to the wilderness; he's not bad at stowing provisions in boats, either. We still had our old stowage spreadsheet (yes, we are geeks!) with the general strategy of what sort of food (cooking ingredients, drinks, packaged snacks, cans of baked beans, etc) go where; he handled the tactics. He built little forts out of canned juice and buttressed them with a box holding different kinds of rice mixes, and defused the potential catastrophe of too many glass bottles by mixing plastics among them. Meanwhile, I sorted the purchases and repackaged things that come in too much or the wrong sort of packaging. With all the cushions stacked in the corners so we could access the storage areas, and all the food scattered around the boat, it looked as though we had been hit by Hurricane Grocery. But finally we have things all packed away where they belong (for the most part!) and the boat shows no sign of all the goodies hidden away in storage.

Well, almost. You might remember I mentioned that our boat has a slight list to port, due to most of our heavier equipment being installed on that side. (Which we did because it's easier to run electrical cables on that side.)  Our stowage plan cleverly places the heavy stuff to starboard. So I think we're finally almost level!