Fine Craft

There is much to get used to in Paradise.  The winds are always howling, there are no calm harbors or anchorages, and there are no proper dinghy docks.  These are pretty big hurdles for me, but in my experiences of sailing throughout New England and the Chesapeake the water is not nearly as beautiful as here, the beaches not nearly as white, and the fish not nearly as colorful!  I guess I have to jump these hurdles in order to enjoy such amazing beauty.

We are in Big Major’s Spot right now, which is right near Staniel Cay, famous for Thunderball Grotto, that was used in the James Bond movie.  Big Major’s Spot is also well known for its wild pigs, and I have to admit that I’ve had a couple of nightmares about those pigs!

But aren’t they cute??  So far they have not tried to attack any dinghies, so perhaps this is a quiet year for them… or the rumors are greatly exaggerated!

There are a number of small cays here that form an anchorage that I would not call calm but certainly isn’t as challenging as our previous stops, and there are pearly sand beaches on each of these islands where the shelling is rather good.  The currents rip between the islands creating sandbars full of beautiful marine life, but you can only gather shells on these sandbars at slack tide.  I will be thrilled if I can collect a few sand dollars today or tomorrow.

From one of these lovely beaches I walked out a ways in the clear shallow waters with Mary, from Sanity II, who had spotted this sea star as she dinghied in to the beach.  When I called Bob over to see he couldn’t resist picking it up and posing.

At today’s slack low tide we plan to swim into Thunderball Grotto, and Bob will bring both of his underwater cameras!  I thought that the grotto would be teaming with people each day, but yesterday only four people went in, and I’m hoping we’ll be as lucky today.

I’m zipping through a knitting project that I’ve designed myself with yarn I bought in England about 5 ½ years ago.  More on that if I ever get better internet coverage! Maybe by then I will be assembling it so that my description will be documented with photos.  Ever hopeful….

Many thanks to our son Chris, who takes our SSB (single side band) transmissions and posts them for us and figures out where to put the photos!

You can still follow our progress here:

Looks like tomorrow is the day.  Wish I could sleep through the whole passage thing.  But I guess once it’s over (and I’ve survived it, hopefully) it will be one less scary thing I’ve been hoping to avoid!  The reward will be island hopping through some lovely tropical waters…..

Yesterday was all about me!  We were invited for cocktails aboard Sea Schell along with others from nearby boats, and Melinda came up the companion way with a lovely chocolate cake for me!  Nothings beats wine and chocolate!…before dinner!

I blew out all my candles, so I better get my wish! (something along the lines of Beethoven’s “Calm Seas Prosperous Voyage”)

Then Bob and I went ashore to a lovely restaurant called Serafina Trattoria for a marvellous dinner out on their terrace overlooking one of Ft. Lauderdale’s many canals.  Life is good!

Today we finished our chores, and now we are battening things down.  Today we saw manatees right near the dinghy dock, eating leaves from bushes that overhang the water!

And an iguana!

And a crazy guy playing with his cool jet toy.  Bob ended up crossing paths with the crew later in the day and found out that they paid $100,000 for that toy. They plan to sell rides on it, although it looks to me like you’d need some skill to control that thing!  I wonder how many rides they have to sell to break even?

I’ll finish up with another knitting joke.  It describes me so well….what I’ll work on for the next few months.

Starting tomorrow we won’t have reliable internet, so I won’t be posting here as regularly as I’d like.  Hopefully I’ll be ‘chillaxing’ in a tropical breeze looking at a pearly white beach across an expanse of gin clear water….  one can hope!

 

 

Our return home was truly magical, and our first Christmas here has been wonderful!….complete with a powdered sugar dusting of snow on Christmas Eve! This is not my house, but a well known inn in our little town…. photo taken by Mark Cappitella.

We’ve seen lots of family and friends, and I’ve slept in my ‘cloud bed’ which I dearly miss whenever I’m away from home.  Rob and Chris have joined me in the kitchen cooking and baking some of our favorite recipes.

And Santa brought me a wonderful surprise!  A beautiful painting done by a tapestry weaver who feels like a friend even though we’ve never met in person.  I’ve followed her blog for years, and we’ve emailed over several years, so I feel like I know her.  I’m talking about Kathy Spoering who maintains a wonderful website on top of painting and weaving such beautiful images.  She’s a very talented woman, and I’m so happy to have one of her paintings.  I’m going to put it in my bedroom where I’ll see it every morning when I wake up!  (At least for the next 10 days or so before we head back to our life on board Pandora!)

Seeing this painting each morning makes me so happy!  A great start to the day.  Kathy’s other offerings are in her etsy shop Yellow Dog Tapestries.

There has been a bit too much celebrating to spend any time in my studio (except to hunt for things and realize how much re-organizing lies in my future).  Today I will finally spend a day working on my pear tapestry.  Can’t ask for a better day, with the threat of coming snow and plenty of good food in the house!

We are in Eau Gallie, Florida now and have spent four days here with a group called the Seven Seas Cruising Association.  Every December they gather here for socializing and learning from various well known sailors who volunteer to give seminars.  This year we were lucky to meet both Chris Parker, our weather router (guru) and Jimmy Cornell who has written a number of cruising books that are well known to sailors. We also met Jimmy Cornell’s daughter, Doina, who has written a book herself about growing up on a circumnavigation, Child of the Sea.

I’ve been hearing about this town called “Oh! Gollie!” or “Oh! Gallie” and wondering how on earth it got its name.  It turns out it is “Eau Gallie,” and since it sits at the water’s edge that explained the ‘eau’ to me.  But what about Gallie?  I’ve just learned that ‘gallie’ is French (galet) for rocky and the two words together are ‘rocky water.’  The town is named for the coquina rocks that abound here.  Still, it’s fun to say…. Eau Gallie!

This has been an exciting weekend for me!  I have met a weaver from Ontario! Her name is Lois, and she is sailing south to the Bahamas with her husband on their boat Astar.  She has a large 8-shaft LeClerc, a 10-shaft draw loom, and the same 8-shaft Baby Wolf that I have.  She knits and spins as well, so we had a lot to discuss!  One of her wheels is the same Lendrum (made in Canada) that I have.  We both had our knitting with us.  She has her OHS certificate of excellence in weaving and has worked in some capacity for that organization. She is a member of very large guild in the Ontario area. I can’t wait to learn more about that. She has heard of my regional guild, MAFA (Mid Atlantic Fiber Association), but not my new regional guild NEWS (New England Weavers Seminar). We both started weaving in the mid-70s.  It is so wonderful to have finally found another weaver!

Another woman mentioned to me that she knows of two weavers that she has met while sailing.  She promised to find them in her list of contacts and give me their names.  I made connections with these women and others during a seminar called Women and Cruising.  This seminar was for those of us women who are new to living aboard.  It was a time for us to express our concerns or fears or voice our hopes in finding other women who have similar interests.  There were birders and shell collectors and bridge players…..  One woman who has her sewing machine aboard along with bins and bins of fabric told me her wonderful experience from last winter.

In the Bahamas she likes to weave traditional baskets of local materials.  I think she called it ‘silver grass’ or something like that.  She said the local women taught her to weave these baskets.  At some point she learned that some of the women have no access to the basket materials they need because it grows in places that are only accessible by small boat.  She used her dinghy to harvest some of this basket fiber and brought it to the women who needed it.

What a lovely way to connect with the local culture, to make friends and learn something so precious!  I hope I will find opportunities like this! Doina Cornell’s tales of spending her childhood sailing around the world with her family were also full of the experiences she had living in such varied cultures from all around the world.  The weekend was rich with amazing experiences and valuable insights!

Walking about with my knitting led other women to talk to me about their own knitting projects.

 Oh!  I must not forget to mention that I finished my Ann Jacket!  Woohoo!  Just for the record I finished it on December 5th, in plenty of time to wear home!  And since I cannot let my needles lie silent I have moved on to the “Ruffle Wrap Cardigan,” and it is practically knitting itself.  Every time I knit what feels like a couple of rows an entire body section is finished.  If only all sweaters would knit up this quickly!  I have finished the back and both fronts, so yesterday I started the first sleeve while walking around the SSCA conference.  The sleeves are the first opportunity to use the fun ribbon that gets knitted into this design.  Wow!  That ribbon is really over the top….perhaps a bit garish?  I’m wondering if I have the guts to wear this when I finish….

We are homeward bound!  Today we will sail down to Vero Beach and will have dinner with our friends who have a house there and split their time between living on the Connecticut River in the summer, in Vero for fall, and on board their boat Camelot for winters in the Bahamas.  Then Monday I will get a rental car in preparation for our trip to the airport, and I’ll do our last minute laundry.  Tuesday we fly home!  I will have 1500 hundred miles under my belt and three full months onboard.  The first tiny drip of experience in what Bob hopes will be many, many experiences living onboard.

Day 90, December 9th: Eau Gallie to Vero Beach.

Who said it won’t feel like Christmas in the tropics??  I believe I said that….

Well, we are really getting in the spirit down here, in spite of palm trees, mangroves, and dolphins!  The lights of St. Augustine are about as festive as you could see anywhere, and in New Smyrna we were treated to a Christmas parade of boats!

During the afternoon and early evening quite a few boats passed us along the waterway on their way to the gathering spot for the parade.

I could see something sparkling bright blue long before we got close to this boat.  It was the flash of the mermaid’s sequined evening gown!  This boat wins the prize!  It was as much fun to see in daylight as it was to see in the parade after dark!

We think about 40 boats went by during the parade.  We gave high marks for the boat that looked like a sea monster (or perhaps Jules Vern’s “Nemo”), the pirate ship, and a sport fisherman decked out as an alligator.

Well, this will be one of those moments best left to memory!  We took a lot of boring videos with my phone, and a few still shots.  Have you ever tried to take photos of moving objects in the dark without a tri-pod?  Yeah….

It was a lovely evening at anchor in New Smyrna.  We were joined by friends from Mystic who are also headed south for the first time, just like us!  Ted and Ginnie are aboard Firecracker which is a sister boat to Pandora.  What a treat to be traveling with friends from home! We combined efforts for dinner, had lots of wine, and enjoyed the parade! Traveling together from St. Augustine we saw our first mangroves, lots of dolphins, and Ted reported that he saw a manatee!  Now we are really on the look out!

Along the way to Cocoa we traveled past Fort Matanza (I need to catch up on Henry Plummer’s visit 100 years ago), Daytona Beach,  and New Smryna which was originally settled by Greek immigrants.  Cocoa looks lovely, and I plan to find out shortly.  There is even a knitting shop!

Going past Daytona

We had been warned that Florida is the waterway of bridges, and boy, it is so true!  In Daytona we went through five bridges in the space of one mile, and three of them were draw bridges that required waiting for opening.  To get to Cocoa we went through three more.  And supposedly this is nothing compared to what lies ahead!

How nice to decorate a bridge for the sailors who pass under it!

 

Knit and Stitch in Cocoa, Florida

Day 82, Dec. 1st: St. Augustine to New Smyrna
Day 83, Dec. 2nd: New Smyrna to Cocoa
Day 84, Dec. 3rd: Lay day in Cocoa