Saturday, January 14, 2012

Work Day on the Boat

We woke up this morning to 48 degrees and clouds – a major shift in weather that forced us to turn on the heat.  Whine, whine, we know, as all our northern U.S. and Canadian friends have been running heat for months.  We also woke up to toilets that wouldn’t flush, so despite having been led to believe our holding tank had been pumped before we bought the boat, we deduced it had not. We called the very nice maintenance guy, Malcolm, who supposedly only works on weekdays, and he showed up at the boat 5 minutes later to get our holding tank pumped out – what a guy! More great service from Harbour Isle Marina, and we promised him we’d never let this happen again.

We also woke up with numb arms and sore hips, so decided we will not continue to live with the hard foam mattress that purports to serve as a bed in our stateroom.  Cruising down 1A highway we found a mattress place that sold us a queen mattress flexible enough that we could fit it through the boat doors and down the companionway to our bedroom – voila, we expect to sleep better tonight!

We finally got around to making a major grocery shopping trip to provision the refrigerator, freezer and pantry.  That wasn’t particularly fun, but the trip to the lively Fort Pierce Farmer’s Market, held every Saturday all year long we’re told, WAS great fun!  We bought lots of fresh veggies, two spinach/feta croissants for lunch, and met a “friend of a friend” at one booth – another small world experience from our previous RV days.

We unpacked the last bin of stuff brought from home and completed our zillion trips to the dumpster to get rid of stuff left on the boat that we don’t want: old/worn dock lines, ancient nautical charts we already have duplicate new versions of, old soiled rugs in the bathrooms and kitchen, packaging from all the stuff we’ve bought, and those huge foam mattresses from the old bed!

Life on a boat = different from life on land.  And we love it!

A promise:  more photos starting tomorrow!

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