Best-laid plans gang agley

We are anchored in the Charles River, on the Cambridge side just downriver of the historic Longfellow Bridge (map). As of this writing this will be our northernmost terminus for the season, and whence we will depart for points south, whenever Hurricane Erin lets us out. For the time being we are hunkered down here to wait out the inevitable churn in the North Atlantic. It's been over three weeks since I posted here, and I am taking advantage of a rainy day here to catch up. (It's now past 10 pm and I started typing this morning.)

Vector in the Charles River, as seen from Cambridge. Longfellow Bridge at right.

Picking up where I left off, we had a decent cruise in good visibility back to the Weymouth Fore River, where we had to hold short for a departing cargo ship right in front of our old friend the Wessagusset Yacht Club. At Shipyard Point we turned up the Town River for a very short distance to the Bay Pointe Marina, part of MarineMax Boston, where we tied to a face dock (map) after a brief wait while the marina moved a boat out of our spot. We were tied up not a moment too soon, with another brutally hot day having us running all the air conditioners as soon as we were plugged in.

Our marina, just left of center near the tank farm, from my plane window.

The on-site Bay Pointe Waterfront Restaurant is dark Mondays, and so at dinner time we had a very slow walk, in as much shade as we could find, to nearby Bravo Pizzeria for decent pizza and a couple of drafts. It was still pushing 90° when we finished, and we had an equally slow walk back to the boat.

Tonopah, NV, where we've been both by motorcycle and motorhome. I do miss this kind of landscape occasionally.

Tuesday morning before the mercury climbed into the danger zone I offloaded the e-bike and rode up the hill to the Walgreens, where Louise had a script waiting. I retreated to the air conditioning as soon as I returned, and got packed for our early Wednesday departure for our week-long trip to California, the reason for our marina stay in the first place. I did have to step outside in the afternoon to meet with the insurance adjuster for the boat that hit us back in Hampton. On another brutally hot evening we walked to the on-site joint for dinner, which turned out to have a decent but enormous prime rib on the menu, which we split.

We had the boat all buttoned up, with surveillance cameras and the electrical system set for an extended absence, before bedtime. Uber picked us up on the dot of 5:30 Wednesday morning for our 7:30 flight out of Logan. The climb-out took us right over the marina and we got a last look at Vector before winging our way west. Alaska Airlines fed us a nice breakfast, and we were at the gate in San Francisco by 11:30. It's a long slog from there to the car rental, but Thrifty upgraded us to a nice Buick Encore from the Hertz fleet.

Lick Observatory, where we once spent a wonderful night with the 36" refractor.

The purpose and timing of this trip was threefold. Firstly, to attend our niece Jennifer's combined 30th birthday and engagement party. Hers is the wedding I will be officiating next June, so the engagement party was, in my mind, a requisite. Louise's mom also had a birthday coming up, and Louise arranged to meet up with her brother, who traveled from Canada for the occasion, to help celebrate. And, finally, we have a couple dozen friends in the area from our two decades of living there, and we made arrangements to connect with as many as possible.

San Francisco is the capital of gender egalitarianism. This couch is in the men's room at SFO.

I won't bore you with a week's worth of details here, but, to borrow an expression, two out of three ain't bad. Two things conspired to completely derail much of the trip. Louise's mom is dealing with some medical issues that arose shortly before we arrived. It's not my place to detail those here, but suffice it to say that Louise and her brother spent much of the visit assisting with that. I suppose you could say the timing was fortuitous from that standpoint.

An indulgence I allow myself only in hotels.

I spent the first couple of days driving around the old neighborhoods to see what has changed. Long-time readers may remember that when we visited these old haunts in our bus, Odyssey, we spent a lot of time parked on various city streets. With few exceptions we were alone in this endeavor, always looking over our shoulders for the constabulary to ask us to move along, and religiously observing the 72-hour limit. On this visit I was floored by the sheer number of people living in their rigs on city streets, a testament to the stratospheric cost of housing in the Bay Area. A number of our old haunts now sport restrictive signage, but the unrestricted streets are chock-a-block with rigs.

On Saturday we checked out of our Mountain View hotel, drove up to Daly City, and checked in to a hotel there, which was absolutely the closest place I could get to San Francisco using points. I would learn later that the reason was that the Deadheads had taken over the city for a giant 60th anniversary concert in Golden Gate Park. Hotels, and parking, were scarce. After checking in we drove up to the city, had a quick visit with Jennifer and her fiancé Evan in their new apartment, and then drove over to the Marina District for the party.

A few hundred feet from where we used to park "stealthily."

The party ran for three hours and we stayed for nearly the entire time. I had made it a goal to meet and chat with as many of their friends as I could, and I mostly succeeded, even in a noisy venue. The next morning I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, which I attributed to talking for nearly three hours straight. We had breakfast, checked out, and drove back to SF, where we picked up our other niece, Lauren, from the train station before a quiet lunch at Jennifer's apartment. I expressed some concerns about my sore throat, and was therefore keeping a respectful distance from everyone, but Jennifer told me she also had one from all the talking she had done.

One of our former spots, now off-limits. I'm not sure what the algorithm is.

After lunch we dropped Lauren off at the airport for her flight back home to LA on our way to San Jose, where we checked in to our third hotel of the trip. In the evening we had dinner with Louise's mom and her partner, along with her brother, before heading back to the hotel. My throat did not improve overnight, and by the morning I was pretty sure I was coming down with something, which I hoped was just routine travel crud. Nevertheless, after breakfast I dropped Louise off at her mom's place, where I also picked up her brother to give him a ride to the airport, just a stone's throw from our hotel. As a precaution, we both masked up.

A different neighborhood, near the Googleplex.

As soon as I got back to the hotel room I broke out a COVID-19 test, and of course it came up positive. I called Louise to let her know, so she could take immediate precautions with her mom, and then spent the rest of the day scrambling to cancel plans and change travel arrangements. Step one was to call the marina back in Quincy and add another week to our two-week reservation (the weekly rate is a lot better). I was relieved to learn the dock was available for the extension.

Crap.

With our return flight rapidly approaching on Wednesday morning, I had to put a stake in the sand and push it out a week, which cost a couple hundred in additional fare, notwithstanding fully changeable tickets. And I had to find lodging for the additional days. We were already committed for Tuesday night, with a nonrefundable reservation at a hotel up by SFO.

Jennifer and Evan's apartment looks out over the Golden Gate. You can see the bridge at left.

The rental car was also due back Tuesday. Louise was able to borrow her mom's car for the duration, and after saying a socially-distanced goodbye she quickly came back to meet me at the hotel. Dinner consisted of a take-out sandwich in the hotel room, picked up alongside some cold meds. Monday evening was supposed to be our big dinner with a large group of friends we'd hoped to see, but naturally that had to be waved off.

Looking towards the bay and Alcatraz.

Tuesday we asked the hotel for a late checkout, and early in the afternoon I took the rental car back to SFO and dropped it off without having any person-to-person interaction. Louise picked me up a few minutes later at the Kiss-and-Fly (really, that's what they call it) and we drove to the hotel that was supposed to be just for a few hours pre-flight. Of course, our plan had always been to return the car on the way to that hotel, so I had not bothered to find one with free parking, just an airport shuttle. Parking the car overnight was another $21.

Before checking into the hotel we drove to urgent care. Louise needed meds -- she only brought enough of her scripts for the planned week and a one-day buffer for flight issues, and only a doctor could fix that. And I wanted to see if I could get a course of Paxlovid. The clinic fixed us both up, and after we checked in to the hotel I ordered take-out from Chico's Pizza in dowtown South San Francisco. It was pre-paid so I spent only 30 seconds masked in the store to pick it up. For reasons unclear to me, they would not deliver to the hotel.

What constitutes happiness during quarantine.

With absolutely nothing we could do except quarantine in a hotel room and get dinner delivered, I scoured the entire bay area for decent rates at an acceptable place, and I ended up booking a few nights in my old stomping grounds of Fremont. No free breakfast, which really we could not partake in good conscience anyway, but they had room service, which was a lifesaver. Wednesday morning, after our originally scheduled flight had departed, we checked out of our airport hotel and drove to Fremont, by way of the pharmacy where my Paxlovid and Louise's meds were waiting.

San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley, and more than half the USB power ports in our room looked like this.

My jaw dropped when the pharmacy told me my co-payment for the Paxlovid would be $1,400. The pharmacist helpfully told me there was an online discount available and handed me the form. We checked into our hotel and I drove back to the pharmacy with the discount code provided by Pfizer, which reduced the co-payment all the way to zero. For the life of me, I will never understand the US pharmaceutical industry.

Kincaids on the bay, where I enjoyed many a meal when my office was across the street.

By this time, I was already on the rebound, but Louise, who of course also contracted it, was just entering the worst of it. We had a couple of miserable nights in the hotel, but then we both felt fine and were just stir-crazy. We were able to walk around the neighborhood and go for drives, but otherwise just stayed cooped up in the room.

I was already well past stir-crazy when Louise finally felt well enough to be bored. I had been throwing darts at the calendar to make hotel and travel arrangements, but she was the one, once she was up and about, to figure the quarantine recommendations down to the minute and determine, late Saturday morning, that we were clear to fly on Sunday. I was able to switch our seats to the Sunday flight, at yet again another fare increase.

I snapped this looking NW from the bay trail. SFO is at right, and the fog is starting to spill over the hills of SSF.

We had booked this hotel through Sunday morning, so it was also a mad scramble to check out a day early without penalty, booking another airport hotel with a shuttle for the night. We drove directly back to her mom's place, dropped off the car, and Ubered to the hotel in Burlingame, which fortunately also served a light dinner at their bar. I had a long walk around the neighborhood, passing a building where I worked in the mid-90s.

We got on the 4:30am shuttle for our 7:20 flight, and spent the free time in the Alaska lounge, where we had a nice breakfast. We masked for the whole flight, apart from when we were actually eating or drinking, and we were back at Vector just ahead of dinnertime. We walked over to the Bay Pointe Restaurant, with its expansive outdoor patio, for another dose of prime rib.

No waffles, but the Alaska lounge had this "pancake printer." I did not partake.

Monday morning our original two-week reservation was up. There was no way we were going to make it out of the marina Monday, but we contemplated asking to change our one-week extension down to just one day, for a Tuesday departure. In the end, we decided to stick with the one-week extension, largely because we needed another couple of days to recover from both the trip and the COVID, and our original plan had an extra four days at the marina to run errands and the like, and we still needed to do that stuff.

Quincy City Hall, built in 1844 and still in use, the longest continuously serving city hall in the US.

One of those planned activities was to rent a car and drive out to New Hampshire to see my cousins. When I tested positive I had waved that off, but now we could just move it back a week. We rented the car mid-day Friday, drove up to spend the evening with them, and drove back Saturday after breakfast. It was a great visit, but we missed seeing our nephew (really my first cousin once removed), who had driven out from New York the week before, when we were originally scheduled to visit.

The stacks have mostly been moved to a newer, adjacent building, but the old library is still open.

The extra time in Quincy also gave me a few days to wrap up and clean up projects. I remediated rust stains on both sides of the boat, and touched up a few bare spots with paint. We turned the boat around Tuesday after I did the rust stains on the starboard side so we could offload the scooters for the rest of our stay (we had come in starboard-side-to for the insurance adjuster, but the scooters load on the port side).

The scooters, in addition to running errands, let us get a bit further afield for dinner, and in the course of our stay we enjoyed Evviva Trattoria in Kilroy Square ("Kilroy was here" is said to have originated from an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard named James Kilroy, and the reference can be found all over town), True North in Hingham, just over the Fore River Lift Bridge from the marina, and Drifters across from the Hancock Adams Common. We also made it back to Bravo one more time, before we landed the scooters.

Sarcophagus of President John Adams. Three other sarcophagi in the crypt, which is deeded property of the Adams family, contain the remains of President John Quincy Adams and first ladies Abigail and Louisa Catherine Adams.

I found some time to walk the historic downtown, including the aforementioned commons, and visit the Church of the Presidents, which just happens to be UU, where John Adams and John Quincy Adams  were members and later interred, along with their wives. Quincy, which by the way is pronounced kwin-zee and not kwin-see, is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year, and much of that history is connected to this church, where John Hancock — not of signature fame, but his father — was pastor.

I strolled through the August Moon festival, for which part of downtown was closed off, and one evening in town we stumbled upon a free music festival in the Commons featuring none other than Tavares, who people of our age cohort might remember from some of their hits like Heaven Must be Missing an Angel and It Only Takes a Minute. Several of the Tavares brothers are still alive and the music sounded great.

Best shot I could get of Tavares without going through the dance floor. Lots of happy people.

Monday was our new check-out day, but as luck would have it, our mail was delayed en-route, and what was supposed to be a morning delivery morphed into afternoon. We lingered at the dock as long as we could, then shoved off and headed over to the fuel dock for a pump-out. The UPS truck rolled up just as we were getting ready to cast off, saving us from having to drop a lunch hook and come back in the tender. We cast off and headed directly back to Boston Harbor, where we dropped the hook in our usual spot (map).

The August Moon festival, which stretched as far down the road as I could see.

Our local friends Chris and Erin, meanwhile, had a little California trip of their own, but Chris was back in time to receive the FlopStopper we had shipped to their address. He left it in the lobby for us, and Monday evening we landed ashore, had a nice dinner at the Sail Loft, and picked up the package on our way back to the tender. We spent about 20 minutes assembling it and deploying it off a midships cleat to see if it would help at all with this sometimes miserable harbor.

Main entrance to Quincy Shipyard. Yes, that's a real, though small, tug.

By morning the verdict was in: even just hanging from the cleat, the FlopStopper helped quite a bit. In the morning we transferred it to the davit crane, to see if moving it further out would be better. Chris was available for lunch, and we headed right back to the Sail Loft with him. After we returned home we spent some time fiddling with getting the contraption back on board and stowed on the boat deck before we could deck the tender.

Our new FlopStopper hanging from our crane.

Our plan had been to move here to the river yesterday afternoon, but by the time we finally got both the FlopStopper and the tender stowed, we missed the window to make it to the Craigie drawbridge before their 3:15 lockdown. We reversed all the steps, re-deploying both the tender and the FlopStopper for another night in the harbor, where having it out on the crane helped quite a bit. I did manage to jam the hoist line in the sheave in the process, necessitating some crane surgery. We tendered over to East Boston for dinner at Democracy Brewing, which has been open just a month and is still getting in the groove. We remembered the space from when it had been Mavericks Tavern.

FlopStopper submerged under the crane arrangement. The guy lines on the crane are to keep it from swinging fore and aft.

Today it has been raining most of the day. This morning we got everything ready to go, but we needed to wait until 1pm to weigh anchor so we could squeeze under the Bill Russel Charles River Bridge, which we need to do at 1/3 tide or lower. We left the FlopStopper, and thus the tender, in the water until the last minute.

USS Salem museum ship, permanently moored at Quincy Shipyard. I did not go aboard.

Getting here from the harbor is something of a gantlet of obstacles. After squeezing under the bridge we immediately had to enter the Gridley Lock. They put us in chamber 1, which is just 23' wide, giving me just 3' on either side to maneuver. We learned only at the last instant that there are floats on either side of the chamber, so we had to lower the fenders to the waterline.

German midget submarine Seehund, located with the Salem as part of the same museum.

Once out of the lock it is a tight turn to starboard to clear the Bunker Hill Memorial (I-93) bridge and then call "Tower A" to open the MBTA rail bridge. Between the lock and the bridge, while station-keeping for the rail bridge, we heard the unmistakable sound of the thruster drive leg failing, and that is the end of our thruster now until we can get a replacement leg and a haul-out. I will have to make the return trip without it.

One of the projects I tackled in Quincy was to try to clean these stains off our relatively new fender. Nothing worked, and I broke one of the soap dispensers on our sink in the process, thus creating another project.

After the rail bridge comes the Craigie drawbridge, part of the old dam upon which sits the Boston Museum of Science. The bridge marks the entrance to a 550' long canal, just 45' wide, that was the old lock, and I had to make a radio call to ensure no oncoming vessels would enter the canal before we could make it through. We had the hook down here by 2pm, an hour after we started, in light rain.

Last night's sunset in Boston Harbor.

We ruminated about going ashore in the rain, but there is a dock just a hundred yards off our stern, and we decided we could make a standing tender ride and a five-minute walk to the Locke Bar, which was quite good. By the time we got back home the only things wet, really, were our shoes.

Dinner at the Locke Bar.

We'll be hunkered down right here until Erin (the storm, not our friend) has passed, the weekend is over, and low tide on the harbor side falls between the 9:30 am and 3:15 pm lockdowns for the bridges. I'm looking forward to exploring a little bit of Cambridge and more of this side of Boston.

Wastin' away again ...

As I begin typing, we are underway in Tampa Bay, approaching the Sunshine Skyway Bridge with the St. Pete skyline receding behind us. It's been a wonderful stop, and we could easily stay a few more days, but today and into tomorrow is the only decent window we will have for crossing the Gulf of Mexico for the foreseeable future, so we decided to make a run for it.

Our destination is Key West, where we will spend a few days before cruising up the keys to Miami. Our usual haunt in Key West is the municipal marina at Key West Bight, but they were sold out when I called, so we are instead heading to the Margaritaville Resort, tucked in behind the cruise ship pier. This being high season, every place in town is ridiculously expensive, but at least we can use all the resort facilities. I do not to expect to run into Jimmy around the pool, but I'm sure there will be a surfeit of parrotheads.

When last I posted here, I was actually typing aboard an American Airlines jet, en route to San Francisco. The confluence of being in a place with a decent airport, a place with reasonable dockage for Vector, and a place where we have good friends who were willing to pet-sit for us allowed us to make a trip back to our old stomping grounds to take care of various things and get some visits in.


Yosemite National Park from our flight. That's Half Dome just right of center frame, with Yosemite Valley down the middle.

To that end we weighed anchor at the St. Petersburg yacht basin in the early afternoon of the 20th and backtracked to Boca Ciega Bay, at the southwest corner of St. Petersburg. We had made reservations for the 21st at Maximo Marina on a decent weekly rate, and our plan was to check out the channel to the marina on a favorable tide, then drop the hook in the bay and perhaps tender over to the Gulfport municipal dock for dinner.

As luck would have it, we arrived in 15kt of crosswind out of the north, and even at a +1' tide, the marked channel from the ICW to the marina was incredibly shallow, we think due to water being blown out of the bay. There was at least one stretch where the sounder registered less than six feet and we plowed our way through the silt. We had been advised to follow the markers for the best water, advice which proved to be plain incorrect, but we made it all the way to the marina's entrance canal without getting stuck.

Given the difficulty we had getting up to the channel, and the fact that we'd need to come into the marina much closer to dead low tide in the morning, we opted to skip the anchorage and go directly to the marina a day early. We arrived before closing time and tied up at our slip (map), got all squared away, and walked a couple of blocks to Portofino restaurant in a nearby strip mall. It was next door to the Publix, which we also needed because we were out of milk for our morning coffee. Fortunately, I was able to buy just a pint.


An earlier window shot from the plane. I think this is Ivanpah Solar.

Tuesday we Lyfted over to Steph's place to borrow her car, which we subsequently used to schlep Angel and all her accoutrements over to Karen and Ben's place in Clearwater. Ben was traveling on business and Karen had very generously offered to watch her for us while we were away. We wanted to arrive early in the afternoon and spend a couple of hours, to let her acclimate to her new surroundings while we were still around. She settled right in, so after an hour or so the three of us went for a quick dinner at nearby Rumba's. After dinner we said our goodbyes to both Karen and the cat, and brought the car back to Steph.

We spent the whole day Wednesday flying, and the following six days were a whirlwind of appointments and visits. Among the former, we met with our financial planners in San Jose, and we also made an inspection visit of our condo in town, which we rent out. This is only the second time we've been back inside the unit since we moved out of it over 15 years ago. The tenants wanted to be present, and met us at the door.

Things were in surprisingly good shape, considering our major kitchen and bath remodel turns 19 this year. The tenants, who are very nice, pointed out a few things while we were there that clearly need to be addressed: the glass surface cooktop was cracked in several places, the microwave turntable was no longer rotating, and there was a four-lamp light fixture in the master bath with an intermittent connection in one of the lamps.


New microwave range hood installed. Maple cabinets are in great shape.

We took photos and made notes of all these things, and I sent a long missive to our management company about buying replacements and getting an electrician out to the unit to install them. But overnight it worked on me that we'd be paying thousands for work that I might get done before we left, and so I arranged with the tenants to get back in for a few hours. We dropped by Home Depot together and got a new light fixture, and after dropping Louise off for a family visit, I ran to Fry's to see about appliances.

Fry's is a chain of giant electronics stores (that also carries some appliances), which is imploding after nearly forty years in business. Ironically, they are famous for supplying Silicon Valley with all the bits and pieces to design the technology that ultimately made them obsolete. It's sad to watch; I imagine they'll be bankrupt in a few months. In any case, they have little inventory left, but I was able to snag the last over-the-counter microwave in stock at a clearance price of $130. The only glass cooktop they had was the floor sample of a high-zoot model retailing for $1,500. They were willing to knock it down 30%, but I needed it to be less than half that.

I bought a few cheap tools at Dollar Tree and spent the afternoon changing out the light fixture and the microwave. No way could I have been lucky enough for the mounting holes in the top cabinet to line up with the mounts on the new unit, but I was able to borrow a cordless drill and 3/8" bit from a contractor working on the exterior of the building, and thus did not have to drop $100 at Home Depot on them (still a bargain compared to having to send someone out).


The view on our way out of the anchorage this morning. The trawler came that close to us, too, at the other end of his circle.

No one had a cooktop in stock, so we'll still be paying an electrician to go out there and install one. But I figure we saved several hundred on the other two projects, and the tenants are happy. I drove away with the old light fixture and microwave in the back of the rental car. The light probably needed an internal wire replaced, and the microwave needed a $10 turntable motor. But without the wherewithal to repair and re-purpose them, we reluctantly dropped them off at the San Mateo recycling center just a block from our hotel, where they ended up in a scrap dumpster.

In the course of our travels around the area we made a few detours through some of our old neighborhoods just to see what's changed. The thing I found the most remarkable was the sheer number of RVs now parked on the streets, almost everywhere you looked. Long-time readers may remember us "stealth parking" the bus on city streets during our annual visits to the area; the need for stealth, it seems, has passed. Even tony Palo Alto has its "RV row" -- the bay area housing crisis has risen to epic proportions.


This is now typical of industrial back streets in the bay area. Each vehicle has to move every 72 hours.

It was a full calendar, especially with the unplanned appliance replacement project, and by the time Wednesday morning rolled around we were very ready to return home. I celebrated the completion of another orbit of the sun Wednesday by spending the whole day flying. Our connection in Charlotte was so tight we could not even stop at the bar for a celebratory beer.

Rather than Lyft back home and spend Thursday doing the whole two-Lyft dance to borrow a car to get the cat, we grabbed a cheap rental car at the Tampa airport when we landed. We were home by 11pm, happy to be spending the night in our own bed. Thursday we drove up to Clearwater to get Angel and spend a couple of hours with Ben and Karen. Thrifty let me return the car to St. Pete instead of Tampa, saving me an hour and a few bucks on my return Lyft.

Given our low-water experience on the way in, we waited until mid-afternoon Friday to have at least half tide on our way out. I plotted an exit route that avoided the marked channel altogether in favor of an unmarked route that showed as deep water on my crowd-sourced chart software, but that often proves to be imaginary. In this case it was spot-on, and we had 18' most of the way back to the ICW. We again bypassed the nearby Gulfport anchorage in favor of just returning to the St. Pete yacht basin for a few days.


Green track is the marked channel, less than 6' in spots. Red track was 18-20'.

We dropped the hook in the basin just a bit SE of our last spot (map), where a somewhat shop-worn trawler has taken up residence. The sailing cat that was there when we first arrived to St. Pete was still there; I learned later they've been anchored for a month dealing with boat and medical issues. It was pouring when we arrived and we spent the evening on board.

We enjoyed our final two nights in St. Pete, having one final dinner with Martin and Steph, and strolling downtown in some pleasant weather. The city has fixed the "parking meter" for the courtesy docks, so it cost us a few bucks to go ashore, but still less than what we had paid for a mooring ball when they were available.

As I wrap up typing we are in the Gulf, offshore of Longboat Key. We'll probably lose our Internet connection just south of Venice, not to return until we are an hour or two out from Key West tomorrow evening. So far it has been a calm ride, with gentle two foot rollers on the beam. My next post will be underway northbound (well, really eastbound) from Key West, in perhaps a week's time.

Having an epiphany

Happy New Year, everyone. As we begin the final month of our sixth year living aboard Vector, we are underway outbound on the St. Johns River, bound for sea and thence to Port Canaveral. After two hours of climbing uphill, the tide has turned and we have the current behind us. We should arrive in Port Canaveral sometime after noon tomorrow (Monday), dependent on ocean current. I expect it will take me much of the afternoon to complete this post, and we''l be offshore off the northern Florida coast when it finally posts.

It has once again been nearly three full weeks since I posted here. Normally, that would leave me with, if you will pardon the expression, a boatload of things to update. But in actual fact, we were not even on the boat. Now that we've left Ortega Landing in our wake, I can share that a key reason why we took a month at a marina here was so that we could secure the boat and fly to California together.


Approaching Jacksonville on a gorgeous day, coming down the St. Johns from the Ortega.

We flew out on the 19th, the very day of my last post, and in fact, most of it was typed on the flight out, continuing a long tradition of typing blog posts under way. And we returned in the wee hours of yesterday morning, arriving back at Vector around 1:30am. Fortunately, our bodies were mostly on Pacific Time where that was just 10:30pm. And while revealing this only after our return makes it sound like we were on a cloak-and-dagger mission, the reason is much more mundane: we did not want to advertise to the world that our boat would be unattended for a little over two weeks.

Long-time readers who followed us during our adventures in our 40' motor coach, Odyssey, may recall that anytime we had to leave the bus unattended for several days, we simply did not announce our location until we had safely returned. That let me announce all manner of upcoming trips, wherein I usually wrote that the bus would be at "an undisclosed location." Similarly, we never posted a map link or a detailed location when we parked on the private property of friends or certain businesses, in respect for their privacy.

Things are a bit different on the boat, inasmuch as we simply can't hide our location. The same transponder that keeps us safe in major harbors, around blind corners on rivers, and in limited visibility also makes us easy to track. And so it is that we felt discretion to be the better part of security in this case.

Regular readers will also know that it is very rare, indeed, for us to both leave the boat together. Between the ongoing demands of the boat (which, unlike the bus, can't just start its own generator should the power go out and the batteries get low, for example), and the demands of having an 18-year-old cat with only one kidney, we usually find it simpler for one of us to remain aboard. Thus it was that Louise went to California for three weeks without me back in October, and I deployed alone to the Virgin Islands the previous year.


The cat is so love-starved from two weeks in "jail" that she's spent an uncharacteristic amount of time on my lap. Here she is interfering with route planning last night.

Like the October trip, this one was necessitated by family medical issues. And while Louise could have again gone on her own, that would have us spending the holidays apart. Beyond that, we had already been planning to make a quick pilgrimage to the SF bay area in late January, after first getting settled in someplace in South Florida for a long-term stay, just to tend to business there and catch up with our many friends from two decades spent there. So we opted to just go together and roll that visit into this trip.

We booked ourselves into the Hilton Santa Clara for the holidays, because it required the least number of points from my Hilton HHonors balance. I was expecting to have to buy breakfast every day, but on check-in they upgraded us to the Executive floor, which has a complimentary hot breakfast in the concierge lounge every morning, and hors d'oeuvres each afternoon. The lounge also had a great view of all the holiday lights of WinterFest at the Great America amusement park right across the street. Both the Hilton and Great America have been there for years, but now that landscape is dominated by Levi's Stadium, where the 49ers play. On game days, the hotel has to clamp down on parking.

We had an excellent Christmas dinner of roast beef with all the trimmings at the home of our good friends and nieces in Menlo Park, opting to leave the car at the hotel and ride-share so we could imbibe. It was a great evening. And then, like clockwork after a long airplane trip, I came down with the crud and was down for the count. It's a good thing our room was nice, because I spent the three days we had carefully budgeted for bay area visits in bed, watching a Godfather marathon. Leave the gun, take the cannoli.

I did drag myself out for a pre-scheduled meeting with our financial planners, who are in San Jose, and to do a quick walk-through of the building where our condo, which we rent out, is located. The afternoon hors d'oeuvres, which we had expected to miss entirely during our stay, saved me from having to drop thirty bucks on a sandwich and beverage in the business-hotel-priced restaurant in the lobby.


My in-laws changed all their ceiling lights to LED without realizing the dimmers also needed to be updated. Ever the good son-in-law, I replaced six dimmers with LED-compatible ones while we were there.

I was mostly recovered enough to drive out for a previously scheduled visit with our good friends John and Linda in Cameron Park in the Sierra foothills, who moved there this year after a long time in San Jose not far from our place. From Cameron Park we continued over the hill to Sparks for a brief stay at the home of good friends Julie and Jim and a visit with my dear friend Dee, all of whom we have not seen since before we bought the boat.

New Years Day fell on a Tuesday this year, and we had a great time catching up with our many motorcyclist friends from our "Tuesday Night Dinner" crowd, hosted for the occasion at the home of our good friends Kevin and Angela. A big shout out to everyone who came down to see us. In the course of the two weeks we also got in visits with all of Louise's parents as well.

Trying to cram lots of visits and errands into a limited budget of time always makes the visiting seem too short. But by the same token, after a bit more than two weeks we were very ready to come home to the comfort of our own bed, our own stuff, our own food, and our own cat. We spent the entire day Friday traveling. We were very relieved to find all well aboard Vector when we returned, and a big thanks to friends Steve and Barb aboard Maerin for keeping an eye on her for us while we were gone. It also helped my peace of mind to be able to look in on things daily with our camera system.


Sunset offshore of the First Coast.

Our one-month booking at Ortega Landing was up yesterday, but between having to pick up the cat and my scooter, and the jet lag, we were ill-equipped to depart. We extended one night, to this morning, to get everything done. From there we were prepared to just head downriver to our familiar anchorage or maybe one of the free docks, but by pure chance today through tomorrow happens to be a perfect window for an offshore passage.

The window is actually good enough to have gotten us all the way to Fort Pierce, or maybe even Palm Beach or beyond, but also by chance we have three sets of cruising friends who are in or near the Space Coast at the moment, and as long as we are going right past we did not want to miss them. So we are coming back in at Port Canaveral, and we'll proceed down the ICW from there, have our visits, and if conditions permit we can go back out again at Fort Pierce.

This morning we decked the scooters and dropped lines at the peak of high tide, 11am. There is less water overall in the river right now than when we arrived, and even with the high tide departure. our sounder registered as low as 5.3' crossing the bar on our way out of the Ortega. We never even slowed down, so the sounder was reading the top layer of some very soft silt.

Ironically, today is the nicest weather we've seen since arriving, although we heard there were several very nice days while we were away. The marina has a very nice pool and hot tub, but until today it was never warm enough to want to walk the full length of the dock in a robe to try them out. Still, it was an absolutely gorgeous cruise down the Saint Johns. Leaving right at high tide meant we had a knot of current against us for the first couple of hours (the current does not reverse at the same time as the tidal maxima), but by the time we were passing the container terminals our fortunes changed, and at one point we had three knots behind us, whizzing downriver at close to ten knots.


Today is Epiphany but we have not had a chance to put away the decorations since returning. I turned the tree on for the evening in the salon; one last hurrah.

It's been a perfect afternoon and evening on the ocean, nearly flat calm. There is little current to speak of and we are doing our normal cruising speed of around 6.5 knots. As I wrap up typing we are just abreast of St. Augustin and we can see the many lights of the city some ten miles off our starboard beam. We had a very nice dinner on board and I am about to take the evening watch, with Louise turning in. She will relieve me at 03:00.

At our current speed our ETA is around half past noon. With any luck the free dock at the west end of the harbor will be available, otherwise we will proceed through the lock and anchor in the Banana River. We should have a relaxing (and sleepy) afternoon aboard, and we'll work on connecting with friends on Tuesday or so. My next post here will likely be after those visits.

The view from 30,000'

We are back home in Alabama after our whirlwind trip to California. I barely had time to keep up with email, let alone blog; now that we're home and rested I can catch up. We're not in any hurry now, as we paid for a full month here at the Riverwalk Marina in Decatur (map). I had expected to take just a couple of weeks, but the monthly rate was less than even seven days at the daily rate -- a no-brainer.

We arrived here mid-afternoon Thursday (the 7th), shortly after I posted here. We're on the north side of a face dock, and we arrived in ten knots of wind out of the south, making for quite the challenge docking. The marina has no staff, and it was a good ten minutes of back-and-forth maneuvering before I could get the midships close enough to the dock for Louise to lasso a cleat. All's well that ends well, and we tied up without incident.


Sunset over the Tennessee, from the Hard Dock Cafe at the marina.

The marina is actually on an island in the middle of the river, which in turn is really part of Wheeler Lake. A causeway connects the island to Tanner, Madison, and Huntsville on the north shore of the lake, and the "Steamboat Bill" bridge connects it to Decatur proper on the south shore. Consequently, nothing at all is in walking distance here except the restaurant on the property, the Hard Dock Cafe. It's extremely popular, with live music most nights and a good crowd. On the weekends, some patrons arrive by boat.


A unique view of Vector, from 30,000' (click to enlarge). It's the white blob just below the green roofs.

With temperatures in the high 90s and heat indices some ten degrees higher, we opted to just walk the hundred yards to the Hard Dock for dinner when we arrived. The food was decent and the beer was cold, although the joint is open-air. Still, it was better than lowering the scooters in the heat, or cooking. We landed the scooters Friday morning, when it was a bit cooler.


Approaching Decatur. The rail bridge had to open for us; the marina is beyond it.

Also on Friday, a semi-truck from R&L Carriers arrived with our mini-split air conditioner on a pallet. We unloaded it all from the skid as soon as it came off the truck, and were able to wheel the components down to the boat on our collapsible luggage cart individually. This marina does not even have a dock cart. I had not figured to dive right into the installation before our trip, but after uncrating it all and looking it over I decided I could just get started, rather than have it cluttering up the boat.

It took me the better part of three full days to install it, which included a trip to Lowes for mounting bolts, PVC fittings to sleeve the holes in the boat, and a power cord. I've already written up the full installation in its own post, so I won't repeat it here. I'm happy to report that we tested it again when we returned from our week in California and it's working fine, so it looks like my refrigerant connections are leak-free.

Tuesday we cleaned up the boat, got it set up for a week without us, and took Angel to the vet for boarding. The vet turns out to have a patio boat which he keeps in this marina, and he allowed that he had noticed our boat here. We are the biggest thing here. Louise took the cat over in a taxi, and I followed on the scooter to pick her up. We reversed that process yesterday to retrieve Angel, who is still settling back in to her routine aboard.

Executive Connection picked us up Wednesday morning at 0530 for our 8am flight. We had asked for a 6am pickup, but they had a conflict. It turned out to be fortuitous; our 8am flight led to a very tight 45-minute connection at ATL, where connections often involve taking a train to a different terminal. The 5:30 limo got us to the airport in time to make a much earlier flight on standby. This plane was nearly empty; we had a row to ourselves, and we had plenty of time in Atlanta for a leisurely ride to the next terminal and a sit-down breakfast to boot.


A sign that makes sense only to denizens of Stanford University and its environs.

I won't bore you with all the mundane details of our visit to the bay area. Suffice it to say that in six days (seven nights) we had 13 different visits, most involving a meal, seeing some 36 different friends and family members. It was completely exhausting. Beyond that, we normally eat only one full meal a day, at dinner, and have more like a light snack at breakfast and lunch time. On this trip, we ate three full restaurant meals a day, and our bodies were complaining vociferously by the end of the trip.

I made a pilgrimage to our condo building, the first in several years. Our unit is rented out, so even though I have keys I could not enter; in hindsight I should have asked our management company to give the the tenant notice so I could just go in and have a look. I did check out the rest of the building, though, including our storage locker on the garage level. We used to rent this out, too, but it became too difficult to find a tenant among the existing building residents. Long-time readers may remember we stored some items here when we first moved onto the bus, and then had a challenge purging them several years later.


Our storage unit in the garage area. Hard to believe it was once crammed full.

Our last visit to the bay area together was in the bus, at the end of 2012. The economic recovery is in full swing in the bay area, and many new buildings have sprung up in just those few years. I drove around to several of our "secret" on-street boondocking spots, and many are no longer usable due to development or repurposing of nearby real estate. The Sunnyvale Elks lodge, where we'd stayed a few times, which used to have perhaps ten usable RV spots, is now hosting at least twice that many rigs, and there are on-street RVs all over Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and even Palo Alto, a testament to the current housing crunch in Silicon Valley.

The tragic shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge happened while we were in California, and we spent what little time we could spare watching coverage and reading the follow-up. Long-time readers may know that we spent considerable time in Baton Rouge as volunteers for the American Red Cross, and the shooting was not all that far from the area where we worked, also off Airline Highway. The event prompted me to spend some time looking at the area on Google Earth.

The building where our disaster headquarters was housed was a vacant Walmart store, a common occurrence on disasters, as Walmart is a significant donor and we work with their real estate department. Heretofore I could not disclose the location of this facility on the blog, because we continued to use the building as a disaster relief "hot site" for several years; Louise and I, in fact, worked three different disaster relief operations there over several years. We spent more time in Baton Rouge, LA, than any other single place while we were on the bus.

Walmart has since reopened the building, after significant upgrades, as a Sam's Club, so I can share it now. While I was on Google Earth looking at how the area had changed, I decided to go back through some of the image history, and I discovered a satellite photo from our very first week on the job (and boy, were we green), responding to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Odyssey is clearly visible in the parking lot of the Cortana Mall, across the street from HQ, right next to the Spirit Of America mobile feeding kitchen. You can see the ground-level photo in this post from, quite literally, the day before the satellite pass.


Our bus, Odyssey, during the Katrina relief operation (click to enlarge). A few support vehicles are with us in the mall parking lot. The western half of the Lowes parking lot is full of Budget rental trucks for distributing food and supplies (we spent time in this lot, too). The old Walmart lot is full of rental cars -- volunteer transportation. We spent a few weeks in the Baptist Church lot as well.

We spent our final night in the bay area at a hotel just north of the airport, ironically surrounded by marinas. It was actually a much nicer room than where we spent the other six nights, but all we go to do was crash for a few hours after checking in at nearly 10pm. Wednesday morning we had to leave first thing to return the rental car to its off-airport location and make our flight.


SF bay from the air (click to enlarge). The GG bridge is shrouded in fog, but SF is about center frame. To the right is the old airfield of Alameda Naval Air Station; long time readers may remember we've spent a bit of time there having Odyssey serviced at a bus shop in one of the old paint hangars.

We had clear skies and great weather for the flight from SFO to Atlanta, and I was able to snap a few photos out the plane window. The bay area is always fascinating from the air, but I also managed to look out the window at just the right time to see our anchorage at Joe Wheeler State Park, most of Wheeler Lake, and even Vector sitting in the marina from 30,000 feet. We had a dinner layover in Atlanta and it was four hours between our flyover and when we'd be back at the boat in person.


Wheeler lake. At far left is Wheeler State Park, where we anchored.


Decatur, AL, with Riverwalk Marina just right of center frame.

Our final flight from Atlanta to Huntsville was, in fact, delayed, and we counted ourselves lucky that we did not miss our limo appointment when we landed. We found the boat in good condition, if intolerably hot, and after cranking up the air conditioning we collapsed. I think I spent most of Thursday in a stupor, after a completely exhausting week, compounded by jet lag.

Yesterday I managed to get back into the swing of things, even starting the project list back up. We had to get the cat in the morning; we intended to pick her up on Thursday but did not realize the vet closes early that day, at 11am, and we moved the boat to the pumpout and back first thing Thursday instead, wanting to do that in the relative cool of the morning. My first project was to try to clear up the last remnants of the mini-split project.

The big one of those, of course, was the shelf I had to remove over the pilothouse settee. This is a really, really nice shelf, with nicely rounded corners and seamless joints; I can only imagine what our friend and former master of this vessel paid for it, but knowing yard rates for millwork, I'm guessing well in excess of a "boat unit." Thus we really did not want to consign it to the scrap heap (which, really, would have been a "free to good home" pile at a marina someplace), but rather to keep it for ourselves. We ultimately settled on a spot for it over the master berth.


Shelf from the pilothouse, now in place over the master berth.

It looks great there, and will give Louise some more storage for quilts. We can't really use it for books, because it's four feet above our heads when we are sleeping and the risk of books falling in rough seas is a real issue. I'm glad we were able to find a use for it on board.

I also moved Mr. Roboto downstairs to the master stateroom, getting a head start on making him operational there. We made a stop at Home Depot to get some parts for the project, to plumb the condensate drain to a hose, by way of a ball valve, so the unit can be drained without moving it from its new perch on the forward dresser top. I'll post some photos as the project progresses.

We had initially thought we'd be shoving off about now for Chattanooga. But as long was we are paid up all the way to August 7th, instead we'll spend a bit more time right here in Decatur. That will let us get past the current heat wave with full air conditioning, and I can also knock down some of the project backlog. The generator needs its oil changed, and both engines are overdue on valve adjustment, plus I need to finish up the portable air conditioner project in the master stateroom.

At this writing, I'm not sure when we'll leave here. We're already ahead of the game on dock fees, so there is no need to stay any longer than we feel like, but, by the same token, we are not in a hurry. If we get a later start upriver to Chattanooga, then it's possible the next upstream lock will be reopened by the time we are done there, and we could continue on all the way to Knoxville if we feel like it.

I'll probably post one more time while we are here in Decatur, and by then I should have a better idea of the plan moving forward. In the meantime, we'll be making some slow progress as we continue to recover from our packed week of travel.