No Country for Old Men

Log: 3988

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Location: Hobe Sound, Florida

Distance travelled today: 22 nautical miles

Total Trip Distance: 1348 nautical miles

Well, I’m back on the boat after a month and more repairs than I ever imagined at the Riviera Beach Yacht Center just north of Palm Beach. I was told the boat would be finished last Friday with maybe a little final cleanup Monday morning. So I came down Sunday afternoon to find it was nowhere near finished. I won’t go into it because it’s depressing, but I will say that the guy who sold me the boat, the people who built it, and the surveyor should all be shot. My only consolation now is that so many things have been fixed, there’s very little else that can be wrong.

In the middle of lamenting all this, Perfect Deckhand James Abele called to tell me the most unique boat story I’ve heard yet. He couldn’t get his pontoon boat at Lake Martin to start and nothing electrical worked at all. Upon taking apart the steering console, he found that muskrats had eaten all of the wiring behind the instrument panel. And yes James, it did make me feel better to hear of your misery. I feel your pain. Must be muskrat love.

Anyway, after the final work was finished today at about 4 pm, I finally got underway. I couldn’t go far that late in the day but I had to get out of there. I’m traveling alone, which is not a bad thing at all. While I always enjoy the help and good company of friends on these trips, there’s something delightfully free about travel alone. I’m not on any schedule. I go to bed when I want and get up when I wake up and pretty much do as I please. Meals are nowhere near as good as when a good cook is with me, but I’m free at the end of a long day to just open a can of sardines and drink a little wine, without worrying about being a host. I’m kind of enjoying it.

For safety, I'll be mostly traveling in the waterway. It’s shallow enough so that if the boat sinks, the majority of the boat will still be above water. In the event of a fire, I’ll just jump off and swim ashore. I may take a short dash out in the ocean on a calm day, but there will be no long trips at sea around Cape Canaveral. The Intracoastal is more difficult because you must constantly be alert and steer manually all day. However, the scenery is sometimes quite interesting.

Which brings me to the point of this entry, scenery. Whoever thinks south Florida is only populated with retirees needs to come down and check out the waterways down here. It’s No Country for Old Men. I leave you with a few of my snapshots along the way: 

Even though it’s spring, it’s never too early to think about football:

I yelled to this girl that it was time to turn but she wouldn’t go for it.

Where else to dance but the back of the boat?

As I said, it’s no country for old men: