We have been here a month - about three weeks too long - and are leaving tomorrow morning.   Today we worked around the boat and got things straightened up and cleaned.  I made some English muffins this afternoon.  I have always wanted to learn to make them and discovered they are quite easy to do.  I was forced to learn as I like them for breakfast and they were ridiculously expensive in The Bahamas.  They are actually put on a griddle to “bake.”  The hard part is transferring them to the griddle as invariably the shape changes a bit, but they are still delicious, much more nutritious than the store bought ones, and of course cheaper.  (Obviously, nothing too exciting is happening here if the most interesting thing I can take a picture of is English muffins.)

The genset is fixed and the repair was under warranty so we didn’t have to pay for the parts or labor.   Actually, after the company repairing it realized the part was included in the warranty, they decided to give us a new one instead of repairing the old one.  Of course, they spent one week getting the old one repaired but we’re glad to get new parts, not repaired ones.

The weather is still unbearably hot and humid here. The entire East Coast, at least through Charleston, is experiencing a heat wave, so we won’t get cooler weather as we go north.   We’ll leave in the morning and sail overnight to Port Canaveral.   Port Canaveral is commercial and there are always cruise ships coming in during the night so they are at the docks in the morning for the passengers to disembark.  That means we’ll see a number of them as we approach the channel and will need to time our trip so we arrive in daylight on Saturday.  We’ve experienced this before and will be watching for the ships on radar.  It’s 148 miles from the Port Everglades (Ft. Lauderdale) inlet to the Port Canaveral inlet.  If we average 6 kts, it will take 24 hours. Winds are from the south and seas are 1-2 feet for the next few days, so we won’t have much help from the wind.  However, we’ll be in the Gulf Stream for awhile and that will give us several knots of push.   Last time we took this trip we underestimated our speed and had to slow down in order not to arrive in Port Canaveral in the dark.  The bridges on New River close between 7:30 and 9 am so we need to leave our slip no later than 7 am to get through all the bridges before they close for rush hour.

We rented a car for several days this week as we had quite a few more errands to run.  Our grocery list is short, as we still have lots of food left from the provisioning we did for The Bahamas cruise.  We’ll probably just finish those by November when it is time to provision again for a trip offshore.  It would be nice to put away the plastic storage boxes we’re using for all the food, but right now it’s filling up a bed in one of the guest cabins. 

My daughter Jennifer will be visiting us in Port Canaveral, the only reason we are stopping there.  We’ll stay for three days and leave on Tuesday.  We’re staying at the Ocean Club Marina, which is fairly new with a swimming pool and fantastic clubhouse.  Jennifer swims every day so we chose that particular marina for its pool.  Unfortunately, the dockage fees are $2.25 a foot, therefore we will pay $94.50 a night plus electricity.  We’re paying 55 cents a foot here at New River which comes to $23 a day.

We’re excited to start moving north.  After leaving Port Canaveral next Tuesday, we’ll continue up the East Coast towards Charleston, stopping in several other ports along the way.  Since we ran out of time to get our mast cut down, we can’t go on the ICW as we had hoped, but this will mean we’ll get to Charleston quicker.  We should be there during the last week of June.  Shortly after we arrive in Charleston, we’ll rent a car and drive back to Minnesota to visit friends and relatives,  pick up our car, drive it back it back to Charleston, and resume our “hurricane season” life there until November 1.