We
don’t have a plan, and we are sticking to it.
That’s what any sensible cruiser tells himself over and over. Yes, we must at least have some idea of the
ultimate goal of a cruise and even some idea of what you are doing the next
day, but weather, bridges, mechanical problems, and social changes can create havoc
with the anal planner. I always lay out
potential routes on Coastal Explorer on my laptop and make a quick reference
table on Excel so we can make decisions on the fly without a lot of chart work
on a boat navigating narrow waterways, but things change.
The
big change now is that our contact in Miami will be unable to be there when we
pass through, if we were to head across Lake Okeechobee now. That’s not all bad since we were trying to
figure out how to stall for a couple of days to avoid the weekend on the
lake-crossing route. So now we have
decided to generally pursue our 2009 route where we went south from here in FMB
to Naples and thence to the Everglades and the Keys.
So
now it is time to transfer the routes down the southwest coast of Florida
toward the Keys from the computer to the Garmin chartplotter and get out of
here tomorrow.
Jim
got a new alternator today and installed it, and I replaced a failing marine
VHF radio on the flying bridge (thanks to Tom for the lift to West marine) –
fixing boats in exotic places….
We
took Tom and Willie out to dinner here at the marina last night and had them
over for pizza cooked on our grills tonight.
Nice folks and a lot of help here.
