After a long 3 week winter we thought it would be a good idea to come back to summer with the sun! This picture is not a sunset but really a moon rise! We just couldn’t pass on posting it. Click on the picture to see it in full size it is just awesome.We are back in Melbourne, Florida where we take a few days to complete the installation of new equipments such as a VHF Radio in the cockpit, an electrical horn, new switches for the winch, new sail covers etc… Today we had a breakthrough as we managed to get our Pactor modem working for the first time. The Pactor is an electronic device allowing us to send and receive short text emails using our HF Radio, which has a pretty long range. This will be very useful to post our position when we have no Internet. So far, we’ve been using the satellite phone but at $1.50/min we prefer the free radio. Danielle is actively working on supplying the boat while we are in Florida because once we cross to the Bahamas the price of food will increase by at least 30%. So as usual, she’s the one spending all the money while I do the hard work!
On our way back we were a bit worried of how the boat would be after three weeks unattended under the sun with all windows shut. To our surprise everything was OK and there was no smell in the boat and this even if we actually forgot a couple of apples in a basket on the counter with onions and garlic. This could have turned into an organic disaster but all we had was two liquefied apples and about 200-300 fruit flies. No smell, believe it or not! However, we had to find a way to get rid of the flies. You see, fruit flies are no big travelers. Even if you try to whoosh them away all you’ll manage to do is to move them by two feet. So we had to use the big guns. The best way we found was to use the vacuum cleaner and suck them in. Again, a fruit fly having an IQ of 1.5 and the speed of a flying snail it wasn’t too hard to get most of them. It was a successful extreme hutting of the drosophilae specie. There is definitively no limit to where we ready to go in that adventure of ours! The trick though was to empty the thing as they don’t all die in the filter you know! I just went outside and empty them in the garbage bag and that was it.Since our arrival, a few days ago, the weather has just been astonishing. During the day temperature climbs somewhere between 20°C and 25°C while during the night it is just cool enough to sleep well but not too much so we are not cold. Clear sky and sunny every day. While we work on the boat, the dolphins and pelicans in the marina are actively fishing; the former by swimming so fast that the wakes they generate actually roll the boat while the latter just fly up in the air to dive quickly beak first toward its prey. So you can imagine how much we miss our office work environment with our 8 foot cubicle and recycled air! Hey don’t laugh; most people don’t even have an 8 foot cubicle! Florida is very nice but we are really looking forward to cross the gulf stream and get to the Bahamas with the crystal clear water you can clearly see the bottom 20 feet below. But for this we still have to wait a week or two.
