AquaFennatic Great Loop Blog: Cape Haze Florida – Our Southern Home

Dec 15^th – It was a hot, sunny and windy day today. I decided to remove some diesel dust and salt water stains from the transom and swim platform of the boat today. It was difficult to remove the yellow stains from the swim platform thus Maria and I rode our bikes to Ace Hardware and bought some toilet bowl cleaner. We also rode our bikes to Publix to buy some meatballs for the potluck that we’ll be attending on Saturday. Once we got back to the boat I used the toilet bowl cleaner to remove the yellow stains, which it did with no effort at all. Afterwards I practiced my “Wax on / Wax off” skills to complete the job. Our son Sean contacted us and told us that there was more than 1 foot of snow at our house and it’s still coming down. He was just about to start shoveling and I told him to have fun as we headed towards the hot tub with some of the other boaters. We enjoyed the hot tub crowd and watched the sun set while having a cold one or two. I can’t believe that we’ll be home in less than 1 week. I’m sure it’s going to be a shock to our system going from Hot and Sunny to Cold and Snowy!

Dec 16^th – It was a hot and sunny day today. We went for a dingy ride to the resort to play tennis this morning. Afterwards we explored the area with the dingy first by following a channel filled with waterfront homes and then going through a channel between the mangroves and found Don Pedro Island State Park. We’ll need to go back to the State Park again sometime soon when we’re wearing our bathing suits and sandals since there’s supposed to be a nice beach on the Gulf side of the island. At 5:30pm we took the water taxi to Rum Bay restaurant for dinner with Wayne and Sandy from “Wayne’s World”. It was Captain Dave’s birthday (our water taxi captain) … he’s a very funny guy! He drives the boat like Captain Ron from the movie of the same name.

Dec 17^th – It was a hot windy day with a mix of sun and clouds. We’ve run into a new issue where the air conditioner in the salon immediately pops the main breaker on our electrical panel. The compressor is drawing over 50 amps when it kicks in thus we may have a short in the compressor. I may have to look at a retrofit unit to replace it since it may not be worth fixing the old unit. I’ll have to investigate my options, but for now I’ve decided to wash and wax the cockpit area of the boat today. There was a large turnout for the Christmas potluck with tons of food and everyone loved Maria's meatballs. Matt played Christmas tunes with some interestingly engineered boating related lyrics which made everyone laugh. He had all of us singing along, laughing and clapping. I’m extremely stuffed and I think I’m going to pay for it later!