Pandemic Anniversary Vaccinations

We are southbound in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore of Longboat Key after a lovely three weeks in St. Petersburg. The plotter is telling me we still have over seven hours offshore as I begin typing, and while we were hoping to make Boca Grande this evening when we weighed anchor this morning, our headway is so bad that we might bail out to Venice Inlet in a few hours if we don't pick up some speed. Unlike our northbound trip, seas are a choppy 1-2' and we have ten knots of headwind.

Not long after my last post, we entered Tampa Bay via the Southwest Passage, then turned north and dropped the hook in the lee of Egmont Key (map). The guardian of Tampa Bay, Egmont Key is home to Fort Dade, constructed during the Spanish-American War and remaining in service until 1923. It is being slowly reclaimed by the sea, along with the southwest corner of the island, and some of the fortifications are now popular dive sites.

Full-size sculpture of the Benoist Airboat commemorating the world's first airline flight, at the St. Pete Pier.

Today the island is unpopulated, and is mostly encompassed by a state park, accessible by passenger ferry for day use. The 1858 lighthouse still stands and is active with an automated beacon. The entire key is a bird sanctuary, and thousands of birds make a cacophony in the daytime, but are mostly silent at night. A small pilot station for the Tampa Bay Pilots Association sits right in the middle of the island, and is still an active station today after a century of service. We watched the pilot boats come and go during our stay.

We had a calm night, quiet and peaceful after the legion of day boats and jet skis left for the day. But in the morning, the wind picked up considerably, making 3' waves on the bay and churning it into a washing machine. We weighed anchor with the tide for the three hour cruise to St Pete. Once we got out of the protection of the key, the ride got sporty, and rather than maintain our direct line to the Sunshine Skyway bridge, we diverted north to get into the lee of Fort DeSoto, where the ride again became tolerable.

At anchor off Egmont Key. That's the Tampa Pilot Station ahead.

After making the northward turn toward downtown, I called the municipal marina to ask about the mooring field, which has been closed for the past two years as construction has progressed on the newest iteration of the St. Pete Pier. To our surprise, the moorings were open, and, in fact, had just reopened two days earlier. But they informed me that the dinghy dock for the mooring basin was still closed, due to some sort of permitting issue with the new pier seawall. We could take a ball, but we'd have to run outside the basin, under the pier, and back into the central yacht basin to get ashore.

We said no thanks, and instead dropped the hook in a familiar spot near the control tower of the Albert Whitted Airport, behind the South Basin breakwater (map). From here it is a short, relatively protected tender ride to the yacht club, the city's metered day-use docks, or the boat ramp near the marina office, and we ended up using all three options during our stay in town. It was just as well that we couldn't use the mooring basin, because we later learned there is also no longer any parking there.

The dinghy dock at the mooring basin, chained shut because it dead-ends into the new seawall.

Before arriving in town, in another push to get the now-retired AGM batteries off the boat, I had listed them on Facebook Marketplace. Within a couple of days I had at least two potential buyers, but the logistics of trying to meet anyone at a dock within a window of a couple of hours soon proved daunting. The yacht club had room for us on a side tie for three nights, and so after just two nights in the anchorage, we weighed anchor and headed into the yacht club (map).

It took me a full day to disconnect all the cables from the old batteries, get them out of their racks, drag them to the back of the engine room, and crane them onto the deck, a task I completed before we left the anchorage. Once at the dock I was able to crane them off the boat, and, after a couple of false starts, I eventually had someone show up with cash in hand to cart them away. Two young guys carried each battery all the way off the dock and out to the street by hand.

On a bike ride out to the pier I came across this handsome bird perched on his owner's handlebar.

The yacht club only had room for us for three nights, even though we were enjoying the convenience of being at the dock, both for getting ashore and for doing the follow-on work to the battery project, made easier with shore power available. Between that and some forecast high winds, making tendering unpleasant, we decided to take a week at the municipal marina, where the weekly rate is actually fairly reasonable (although not as good as the member rate at the club). They did not have a full week available at the transient face dock, but were able to put us in an adjacent slip (map).

We offloaded the scooters before leaving the yacht club, since our assigned slip at the marina had two steps up from the finger pier to the dock, making offloading tricky. It was a very short cruise between the docks. The walkway from our dock deposited us directly onto the swoopy new Pier complex, which includes an open-air vendor market, a quick-service bistro, a splash fountain, a playground, Doc Ford's Rum Bar restaurant, and the showpiece post-modern building at the end comprising a restaurant and rooftop tiki bar. An open-sided tram runs from Bayshore Drive to the end of the pier.

My attempt to capture the pier building and some of the grounds on my ride.

I made productive use of the week at the dock to finish the battery project, which took a full four days. That started with ripping out all the old battery wiring, a giant mass of 4/0 copper cables, some over a dozen feet long. I was able to reuse a couple of the longer ones to relocate the new 12v "buffer battery" from its temporary perch suspended over the old battery racks to the fully enclosed under-sole compartment that had originally been for the main start battery.

Class-T fuse relocated to new battery compartment, where it belongs.

That seems like a straightforward project, but in order to get the new cables onto the original bus bars I ended up cleaning up a bunch of old spaghetti wiring original to the boat. I completely removed one of the three four-post negative bars in favor of two bars more neatly arranged, thus eliminating a jumper from several high-current paths, and also eliminating an extraneous ten feet of cable from the engine starting circuits. I also replaced a single post on the 24-volt positive end with a four-post bus bar, and relocated the main class-T fuse to the new battery compartment, replacing the temporary breaker installed there when I first installed the lithiums.

When I powered the inverter back up after the battery project, its battery monitor lost its mind. The voltage is 26.6 as shown at left, not 217.7 as the inverter thinks. Resetting the monitor cured it, but lost my cumulative amp-hour total.

Taking the old batteries off the boat and moving cabling around has changed our trim and reduced our draft. Having four batteries on the port side but only two on starboard made for some 330+ extra pounds on the port side, weight that we have been offsetting with extra fuel on the starboard side that we could not really use. I've moved fuel to level us out.

After our week at the dock we moved back to the anchorage, having no further need of the services there. We left the scooters ashore in an undisclosed location, since we're still avoiding public transit, which is actually quite good in St. Pete. We noted the downtown trolley service is running, along with all public buses, although at reduced capacity. There is also a new free shuttle service that runs up and down Bayshore using an autonomous "self-driving" vehicle, but the vehicle is fully enclosed so we did not try it out.

This spectacular kapok tree is colorfully lit at night and a popular photo spot. My cell phone did not do it justice.

I got a few more projects done back at the anchorage, including changing oil on both engines while I had easy access to oil disposal ashore, adding a safety fuse to the alternator circuit, and carefully removing a poorly-adhered patch on the dinghy, which I am still figuring out how to replace. I listed a bunch of retired equipment on eBay and even managed to ship out a few sales. Both oil samples have already come back normal.

Of course, the main reason we came all the way to St. Petersburg from the other side of Florida was to catch up, as best as pandemic circumstances would permit, with a number of friends who make their home here for at least part of the year. We accomplished that in spades, and it accounts for why we spent so much time here.

Serendipitous lunch with Karen, Ben, Cherie, and Chris. We're more distant than it looks. Photo: Chris Dunphy

In no particular order, we met up with Karen and Ben, Steph and Martin, Kristina and Atle, Diane and JP, and even had a serendipitous visit from Cherie and Chris. We met in person for the first time with fellow looper, online acquaintance, and all-around good guy Alex, and even made some new friends at our new cub, Dori and Bob, Charlie, and Tom. We were fortunate to have good weather for our entire stay, having to bundle up for outdoor dining just twice. A mask mandate is in place, and most restaurants have increased their outdoor areas as much as possible.

I got some cat love from Kiki on the visit. (We also got cat love from Stubby with Atle and Kristina.) Photo: Chris Dunphy

The big news, though, and accounting for extending our stay a few extra days, has been our vaccination. During the course of our stay, Florida lowered the age of eligibility twice, first encompassing my cohort, and then Louise's. Each of us was able to snag an appointment online for the second day of eligibility.

Parting is always sweet sorrow. Today, elbow bumps are filling in for our customary hugs. Photo: Chris Dunphy.

When I got in queue, Florida still had doses of the Janssen (J&J) single-dose vaccine available. In order to get that, however, we had to go to Tampa, to the recently retired greyhound track, where FEMA was running a site. We borrowed a car and drove out together, in case I could not drive home. I was expecting to wait quite a while at this massive centralized site, but it was well-run and we were in and out in a half hour, including the 15-minute post-injection safety period. Many of the military personnel staffing the site sported the new US Space Force insignia.

Exactly one week later, when Louise was able to get in queue, the Janssen supply was exhausted, and she opted for Pfizer instead. Janssen reaches full efficacy at four weeks, about when Louise will get her second dose. She'll be just two weeks behind me for full efficacy, right about mid-April. While we intend to continue to mask up, dine outdoors, and take many precautions, we are looking forward to scheduling some long-deferred medical care and personal grooming, and to having some more transportation options available.

I'm vaxxed!

While we were in St. Pete, the anniversary of the declaration of a worldwide pandemic came and went. This time last year we were anchored at Big Majors in the Bahamas, contemplating our options and our future. It's been over a year since we've had hair cuts, dentist appointments, checkups, Lyft rides, hugs from friends and family, or a hundred other things that in pre-pandemic times we took for granted. We have been more fortunate than most, but still I wept as soon as the needle was in my arm.

My attempt to capture the mood at the Pier Tiki rooftop bar, where we had burgers for dinner.

We made arrangements to come back to the yacht club dock (map) on Wednesday, a full day after Louise's shot, so that we could load the scooters, top up the water, charge the batteries, and do some laundry. That was a full day ahead of our weather window for departure, and we had figured to maybe spend the final night in the anchorage. But just as we were getting ready to weigh anchor for the club docks, SPPD came through the anchorage to boot everyone out.

There's a long story here that I am not going to delve into in this post, but apparently in 2019, St. Petersburg passed a city ordinance that putatively restricts anchoring here. Such an ordinance is not lawful or enforceable under current state law, and had this interaction occurred at the beginning of our stay, I likely would have had words with the officer (and/or the city attorney, possibly in court). Since we were weighing anyway, we just let it slide, and spent two nights at the dock instead.

Vector and her scofflaw neighbors as seen from Pier Tiki. Sailing school behind us.

We had one final dinner with friends out in the Edge district, and made a quick provisioning run yesterday morning before decking the scooters. We were off the dock at checkout time, retracing our steps back to Egmont Key. It was a bit bumpy east of the key when we dropped the hook (map), but winds laid down after dark and we had a quiet night.

Today's wind has been significantly higher than forecast. Not only is the ride a bit bumpy, but it has impeded our progress. We're doing just six knots, which is, at least, better than the 5.5 we were doing when I started typing. We've already passed Venice now and are committed to Boca Grande, and if we can keep our current speed, we will just make a 6:30 dinner reservation at Cabbage Key. If not, we'll be having leftovers on board.

This tiki god, whose mouth encloses a sofa, is the canonical cheeseball photo op at the Pier Tiki.