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We are finally on SYL in Ft Myers, Florida though it was like walking through wet cement to get here.  We left the lake with hugs and waves and high expectations of being on SYL at long last in about 48 hours.  We were well on our way, making good time and as we approached the “Mandeville Triangle” as we have recently coined Mandeville, La; Rusty told me we better call our dear friends Michael and Guiann Carpenter and let them know we are passing thorough and stop and say hello if they are free.  Rusty also add, “we don’t want any car problems”.  We have made this trek from Texas to Florida for many, many years when we were bare boat chartering are when we leave SYL in Georgia and several times we have had car trouble, I am taking MAJOR car trouble like losing a transmission kind of car trouble.  Michael and Guiann always helped us by loaning us cars, putting us up in their home and treating us like royalty.  I called Guiann and made arrangements for us to stop by.  Guiann wanted us to spend the night but we really wanted to get a few more miles toward Ft Myers.  It was not fifteen minutes later that the car started dying.  We had to pull over several times, turn the car off and start again.  We called Guiann and made arrangements to spend the night.  We had always joked that Guiann, the quintessential southern belle, placed a “voodoo” on our car so we would have to stay.  We love, love, love Guiann and Michael and staying at there home is like staying at a 5 star resort but it seemed we were usually on a tight time schedule.

Early the next morning Rusty took our car to the Dodge dealership and we were told we needed not one two fuel pumps.  We had gotten bad gas.  We asked if they could expedient the parts and it seemed the best they could do was Friday, this was Tuesday, and if it didn’t come in Friday then it would be the next week.  Rusty found some after market fuel pumps he could get in by Wednesday at 6:00pm but Dodge wouldn’t install them.  Rusty decided he would do the install, which he did and we were on the road again Thursday.  Schedules changed for the couple we had hired to take the boat the Marathon and they needed to leave ASAP.  We found this out Wednesday before the parts were in.  We couldn’t guarantee we would be on the road by Thursday so we spent Wednesday on the phone trying to figure out what our options were.  We had planned on Mark and Julie taking our car home but they really needed to get home and we  couldn’t be sure when we  could make that happen.  Ultimately we had friends who live in Ft Lauderdale that said they would come get the car and keep it at their house for us……………these were friends we met in the Bahamas in 2010 who have a Seawind 1000 like ours.  We rented Mark and Julie a rental car one way to Corpus so they didn’t have to wait on us.  It all worked out well.

We contacted the water taxi and told them our stationwagon was packed and could we transport our “stuff” as well as us to our boat.  We were told “no problem, I will even have someone to help you”.  Awesome!!  Well when we get there, there is this older fella that was none to thrilled about our stuff and said he didn’t have any help and we would have to do the loading.  So he talked on his cell phone, complaining about the time it was taking for Rusty to haul all our stuff from the car to the loading dock.  We filled up half the water taxi.  Rusty was not feeling great but he got it all done.

I had not been on the boat in months and it had been a long, long time since she had had a “deep cleaning”.  We had quite a bit of repairs done but everything else was pretty much the way Rusty brought it back from Florida a couple of years ago.  There were can  foods that had leaked and created quite a mess, so much stored food that was out of date, etc.   I have never provisioned this way before and I hope I never have to provision this way again. Usually I clean everything from top to bottom and provision in stages.  I buy a little put it away, buy more, put it away, tec.   We only had the car for yesterday morning so Rusty went to the store with a list for what I thought we would need for the entire trip.  Trying to clean out everything while the boat is cluttered and I mean cluttered, is awful.  I started out cleaning like I normally do and organizing everything but this is not going to work.  I have changed to taking everything out and cleaning things thoroughly but to say I am organizing what I put back well………I am using the “stuffing” technique for now.

I cleaned the stove but when I asked Rusty to remove the stove so I could clean behind it he looked at me like “really?”.  I guess that can wait…Rusty is still feeling pretty weak and runs out of gas quick.  The refrig, freezer and major storage areas have been emptied, clean and now I am just “stuffing” things and making list of where I have “stuffed” things.

Rusty is off to the store for fresh produce that he didn’t get yesterday and I am taking a break from cleaning to write this.  Well, back to cleaning and “stuffing”.

We are on our boat and we are in Florida……………We are choosing to be happy!!!!!

Sea Yawl Later!!

Linda

We are enjoying the Lake House.  Visiting with good friends we haven’t seen in ages around the lake, riding in the golf cart, the semi cool spring weather is such a difference from the 4AM get ups and a 20 minute drive into the middle of an oil refinery that spits out sour smells and steam….. 

After resting and sleeping for days now.. I got out and visited the neighbors a bit today.  Our house “Sitton on the Lake” is a unique and quiet respite.  Gentle winds thru the 90′ pine trees.. the fresh scent of clean country air across the water….. looking out the picture windows at the patterns the wind  makes on the surface of the lake are healthy to the mind and body.  Definitely a change from the windowless office I have been spending time in.

Today I made some vacation progress… I tuned up and packed my remote control sailboat in it’s carrying case for the Bahama trip.  My Chistmas gift this year was a 57″ long 10′ tall carbon fiber replica of the 1993 america’s cup sailboat.  I’m looking forward to playing with it in the Georgetown harbor.   I like toys, this one will be quite the conversation piece among the sailors.  It’s a big investment as far as space goes to carry the huge RC sailboat but I know it will be worth it.

Chillin’ at the lake with a big trip on the horizon….

SYL left Destin this afternoon for points South!  By the direction they are taking it seems the Keys may even be their target.  The best thing about leaving from Destin is you can bail out anywhere along the West coast.  With all the trials Mark and Julie have had, I hope they don’t feel the need to pass up much of the pretty part of Florida in order to make some schedule.  Clearwater to Marco is the best part of the ICW. 

Linda and I have done much of the “work” to get ready for our big summer.  The RV is settled, the car is pretty well packed, we made it to the lake.. I have had more than one 10 hour sleep!  Life is good.  After months of 4AM wake ups…… it’s pretty nice to see light coming in the window when I get up.  I’m looking forward to some more of those lazy mornings, some down time here at the lakehouse before we take on the boat trip.

Right now the full moon is reflecting off the lake… yep….. time for some serious rest.

Sea Yawl Later !!

Rusty

The Intracoastal Canal is regreted by some and detested by others, I kind of like it.

I grew up on the Sabine River so running the river is an elemental part of my “good memory” bank.  I have great youthful memories of water skiing for miles on end with my brothers  behind my old 85 Mercury on a 17′ Glastron.  Narrow strands of water and boats have always been an intergral part of my life.  In the late 70’s a Hydrostream boat was all the rage.  I bought a brand new one…. “Loco Coco” brown with metal flakes the size of diamonds.  In 1980 I bought my first V6 outboard, a Mariner 200 “Gray Ghost” and hung it on my Hydrostream Vamp.  I have run a river full of gasoline through that rig.  Life at 79 mph was very good for a very long time.  My son still has the boat.

Mom and dad belonged to the “Rooster Tails”, a boat club in the 50’s that traveled and camped on the rivers of East Texas and Louisiana.  They had embroidered jackets and everything.  Hells angels on the water…..  only different.  It was a family affair that branded me with the love for the river.  Some of my first memories as a kid are riding under the bow of a boat and seeing the process of my dad building a boat in our garage.  On this one campout a thunderstorm approached as we were breaking camp on the sandbar, tents, lawn chairs…. adults loading the boat.  I remember a long bumpy ride with me and Mom cuddled up on the orange life jackets under that bow to escape the stinging rain and lightning as dad motored us home in front of that first big tall 6 cylinder mercury that was ever built.  It was an amazing engine, when you shifted into neutral, the engine stopped, as you shifted to reverse the engine started backwards, so there was no shifter in the lower unit, the engine actually ran backwards.

I guess my love of the river makes the ICW more than bearable for me.  I’m watching my boat go down the ICW right now on it’s way to Florida via “spot” and google earth.  My mind sees the familiar sights I have seen many times as we passed them on our multiple ICW transits.  The entry to the locks at different locations, moss in the trees in Louisiana, The Mermentau river basin, “stump alley”, and crossing the mighty Mississippi are all burned into my brain, easy to recall at a moments notice.

I’m still at work as my boat sees all those things without me, but soon I’ll be on her with my wonderful travel companion, my wife…. for a great spring adventure.  SYL is approaching the Harvey locks soon, ICW mile marker Zero.  My boat has seen the intracoastal from its beginnning at the Mexican border all the way up the east coast.  Sue me, I like a river………….

Yesterday SYL started this season’s adventure…without us.  We have friends that we have hired to take SYL to Florida.  Rusty’s job is not going to be over until later in March so we decided to have SYL delivered so we can make it to the Exuma’s and still have plenty of time before hurricane season starts.  We are both ready to “get away”.  It has been a hard couple of years and this TA is and has been difficult.  Erin and I have been at the lake for almost a month.  E is pregnant with my first grandchild and her husband, Michael, is working nights for the TA so it just made sense to be here.  Monday we head back to Corpus Christi with a stop in Webster for a doctor’s appointment for E.  Rusty and my RV is in the shop having warranty work and won’t be ready until sometime late in the week.  My sweet hubby made reservations at the Omni in Corpus for Monday and Tuesday……I was looking at Motel 6’s.

The refrigerator in the RV has never worked properly since we bought the Columbus new.  Now the freezer smells awful because it defrosted with shrimp in it.  I tried cleaning with Clorox wipes but it didn’t help.  I haven’t completely emptied it so I will try that next.  According to Colonial Del Rey the manufacturer, Dometic, says it is my problem.  We shall see.   If I can’t get the smell out then it will make selling the RV rather difficult.  I am not letting them off the hook that easy.  I have had the refrig worked on twice and this is a new RV.

Anyway, I hope to deal with that while in Corpus.  We are not sure where SYL will be when Rusty gets finished but wherever they are we will meet them there.  For now we just longingly watch SYL on SPOT.

Sea Yawl Later!!

Linda

Life has changed, I can no longer call my mom on the phone and talk about things… ask her advice or hear her voice.  In the normal order of life death happens to everyone but it’s certainly life altering.  My current sober attitude is probably more about working lots of hours under stress, but I’m hoping I can feel “light” again someday.  I can’t see that day yet though.

I fear that when the stress of the job is over, the “normal” life won’t be normal anymore.  I’ve lost friends and people I love before, but this is worse.  much worse.

I can feel the excitement in my life about the upcoming sail.  I’m glad it’s in there.  The boat is almost ready to leave, arrangements have been made for friends to sail the boat to Florida while I finish up here at work.  There are lots of pretty new things on the boat.. that’s always good.  If anything can make me smile… it’s a sailboat trip so that’s good, it’s almost time.  I look so forward to warm beaches playing around the boat in the water… eating the good stuff Linda puts out from her little kitchen.  Running into old friends and the absolute certainty of meeting new ones.  I’m glad we are about a month away from shirtsleeves, shorts and sandbars again.

By the end of the month everyone can start looking at “spot” again.. watching the boat head East then South to Marathon Florida… I’m anticipating our road trip to the Keys.  Linda and I bareboat chartered for years, this drive will rekindle those plesant memories with a big plus at the end.  When we chartered we only had 2 weeks and it was on a borrowed dream.  This year our sail path is yet to be charted, the duration is not vetted and it’s on our own dream…. SYL !!    like I said… better.

I know me… I have more confidence in my joy that I seem to be able to muster right now.  The 2014 sail won’t “fix” everything.  There have always been times when I find a remote beach, sit alone with the water barely waving at my toes for hours on end contemplating life….  this year will be different.  I expect my refelcting time will be more medicinal and melancholy than in past years.  maybe I can let down there….  my life isn’t the same.

I have always remembered the “riddle of the sphinx” from studying in high school Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King.  I don’t know why that left such an impression on me but it did.  In the story there was a monster that guarded an entrance and to enter you must solve the “riddle of the sphinx”.  If you solved it you could enter the gate if you did not you were killed.  No one had ever solved the riddle.  The riddle went like this, “what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening”.  Oedipus answered, “a man, a man crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and walks with a cane when he is old”.  The monster was so mad that it hurled  itself off a cliff and died and Oedipus was made King.

I am not walking with a cane but I am in that evening season of my life.  There are many, many good things about this season: your children are grown, you are more financial secure, you are retired or looking at retirement, thus you have more free time and hopefully life lessons has taught you wisdom.  I appreciate all these things but right now one of the parts of this season that sucks is our parents and some of our friends start having serious health issues.

From April of 2012 till February of 2013, I lost my step dad, who was like a father to me, my only sibling and my mother.  Now our beloved Grannie, Rusty’s mom,  is fighting for her life in an ICU.  Right now, today, this season of life sucks!  I know all the cliches and I intellectually understand “the circle of life.  I know that Grannie loves the Lord and her future is secure but… this season of life right now SUCKS!

Linda

Rusty is in the critical phase of the TA, which starts February 3. He can’t talk or think about cruising right now, he has to be totally focused on work.
I, however, find myself increasingly thinking about our departure. Today, I started my cruising menus so I can get started on my provisioning list. We are trying to eat Paleo and Gluten Free which means a totally different approach to food provisioning.  I am use to baking bread about 3 times a week when we are cruising and it was a big staple in our cruising menu. Pasta was also a major factor in our menu’s. I think for the next month I will be trying out Paleo/Gluten Free recipes that will work without fresh produce since that is always in short supply.

Let me stop here and say something about Paleo/Gluten Free diet.  I have long thought that our diet has too many chemicals in it and I did not like the idea of genetically engineering our foods.  The Gluten Allergy I thought was being way overdone.  I have a friend who has celiac disease and truly has severe reactions to gluten.  But I thought it was a “fad” that now suddenly all these people had “Gluten allergies”.  Because of my friend and his wife I kept giving it a second, third and fourth look.  Then I saw a Dr Oz segment that showed that Gluten allergies were on a continuum from those who were severely allergic like my friend to those who were only mildly allergic.  I decided to try a little experiment of my own with an open mind.

Over the last few months I did a trial and error.  I would go gluten free for a while (maybe a week) and then I would get off ( it usually was not planned).  I started to notice that when I was off of gluten my “arthritis” was not as bad.  I could move around without pain a lot more easily.  Over these last few months I am convinced that gluten can cause an inflammatory process to occur and that it does affect me.  I have long known that sugar is a bad thing for me so…..new eating plan.  As a side note I am also trying to give up milk because I drink way too much of it…….like way too much.  All of these issues are requiring I develop totally new menu’s.  I am making smoothies with almond or coconut milk and it works fine.  I don’t like either of them well enough to just drink a glass of almond or coconut milk but for smoothies they work.  If I have organic milk in the refrigerator I will drink glass after glass until it is gone.  I LOVE milk….but I can’t drink 2 days worth of my total calorie intake in one day in just milk.  Anyway, back to my cruising menus. If produce were readily available it would be easy…..but produce is not available where we sail except in Georgetown.  So I will be trying new recipes.  I tried Paleo Salmon Cakes last night and they were pretty good.  I will put the recipe on our Facebook page.

There are a lot of logistics to figure out between now and when we leave for Florida with the biggest problem being we are starting off so late in the season:  we have  two fifth wheels to get back home (ours to Hemphill and Erin and Michaels to probably the Kemah area), how and when we are going to get the box trailer from the lake to Aransas Pass, the boat refit completed, finalizing plans on what we are going to do with the car we drive to Florida (i.e. are Mark and Julie going to bring it back, do we get Stuart or someone to deadhead in the car, store the car there, etc.)  I will need to unpack a little when we get to the lake and of course all the provisioning for our cruise has to be done.  All doable but the master doer is unavailable right now.  Having said all that, I have learned that it WILL all work out even if I don’t know how at the moment.  It is really hard to not share my excitement with Rusty but I know that is not what he needs right now so…….I’ll just verbalize here…..

Sea Yawl Later!!

Linda

.  I  am still trying to get my mother and Daddy Joe’s wills probated…..what a mess.  A side note: if you don’t have a Will….get one and make sure you have a least two back ups for executor and power of attorney.

Peeking carefully around the corner I can see the possibility of long warm days listening to XM music holding a tall glass of adult beverage while standing 10 feet from the sandbar in waist deep water under the bow of my boat…   I can almost see that perfect “cookie” of a day in my future ~ Waking up when I want to, going to bed when I want to, and filling the middle with whatever sweet creamy stuff I decide to do that day…..  with a little cold milk (and time) I’ll be fat with anticipation.

There must be a mathmatical limit the experts have established regarding how may decisions per minute you can achive before you become overstressed.  During one of these big turnarounds, my DPM (decisions per minute) meter swings wildly from 8AM to 8PM.  At 8 in the morning  that needle is pegged… if it stays pegged for more than 2 hours it’s time to get more coffee….  Then by the time I get home and in my chair with my wonderful wife waiting on me… around 8 in the evening my DPM is bumping the other peg… at zero. 

Preparing to shut down a refinery is stressful, there must be millions of questions that have to be answered in advance in order to have as few suprises possible during the outage.  I have come to believe the number of decisions is directly related to the TA budget.  A 50 mm dollar turnaround probably requires 50 million pre-answered questions before you can begin.  We have probably answered 45 million of them with 3 weeks to go.  Hmmm lets do the math:  5 million questions remaining divided by 50 guys, working 12 hours a day for 20 remaining days… yep that’s about right 416 questions a hour / 7 a minute.   We might be a bit closer to completion than that.. maybe we only have 300 questions/hr to answer.  The problem is – some of these guys can only manage one answer a day so that puts more on me!

Thoughts of blue water and playing with my boat are becoming mentally safer to dwell on.  In 20 days the planning effort will be over.. that’s when the client turns off his big 20 acre kitchen that cooks crude oil.   As soon as he quits making money he starts spending it…  We hand the collosal project over to the contractors to clean and refurbish all the big pots and pans.  My job then becomes tracking progress. 

I am beginning to de-stress though… just knowing the transition from 300 decisions an hour about stuff that means a lot….. to 3 questions a day about which position I want to be in to relax is helping me wring the tension out of my brain as we speak. 

In about a month my DPM meter will be switched over to the DPD scale.  I predict that recalabration will take about 3 weeks to accomplish, it usually does.  My land based stress level is starting to swirl in the bowl…  the decreasing number of questions are allowing me to see deeper and deeper into the funnel.  Soon my view will change.  I’ll be looking over the side of the boat through calm, clear water, or blankly staring behind me as my worries are washed away by the frothy white saltwater.  Sun sets over the ocean are magical.  I see a light.. at the end of the funnel.

Sea Yawl Later !!   Rusty

Some of our cruising buddies are heading East for the Bahamas and beyond and it’s making us jealous.  At work I have to focus 100% on what I’m doing and not let the “call of the wild” enter my conscious mind for too long.

It’s not a problem to think back on trips we have made and talk about them with others… spend some of that mental currency we already banked, but if I let myself think forward and get too excited about the next trip…. I don’t know for sure but I fear I’d be so focused on the dream I’d drop the balls I’m currently juggling.  The prep work to get ready for the next outing must be accomplished with limited passion.

In past duties I had my dream time because I was fast and accurate at my hands on job, but as the leader of the little travelling band I’m currently with… For me to be comfortable I need to know I’m personally doing the best job I can do without distraction so my full time focus has to be on what’s happening now… in one hour incriments.  Subconsiously I know Linda and I will be on the boat soon and I’m trying to keep it that way, the fact that our friends are crossing the Gulf heading toward Florida (and I can track their progress on “spot”) doesn’t help… lol.

My first cup of coffee is done… time to paddle the boat I’m in for the next couple months.