October Notes...

The weather has finally changed! After surviving repetitious days of low to mid 90’s, thunderstorms every afternoon and still, muggy nights in the low 80’s we slowly switched to warm days, less humidity and nights in the 60’s! Wheeeee! Florida is not the place to be in July, August, and most of September! I think our wind scoop was the best thing we ever bought for the boat.

Barnacle issues continue. We have a deal with a local diver to scrape the bottom of the boat once a month. Each month the hull is pretty much re-covered with the little critters. We took the dingy over to a little beach near our mooring to clean off its bottom. The barnacles were about 3-4 barnacles deep and this dingy is mostly NOT in the water as we raise it up on davits at night. We gotta get out of this place....

Big News: We finally sold Catalina Enee! Yes. Let me tell you, it is no fun owning two boats. We left Catalina Enee up in Baltimore when we bought the Endeavour Enee (All boats are named Enee Marie for us). The brokers up there said, “Oh we’ll have no problem selling a fresh water Catalina 30”. That was a year ago and I ended up firing them and selling it myself. Boat Brokers/Pirates? Any difference? Discuss.

We made it to the Chicago Marathon on Sunday 10/22 (no, not by sail) to watch my daughter and son-in-law run their second Chicago Marathon. Last year they ran together in 4:20. This year their goal was to beat 4 hours and they DID! Jason ran in 3:57 and Leah in 3:45! Nice job. A bunch of family and friends had fun watching them and then jumping on the El and trying to find them again. This actually worked as we had two teams of fans so that the kids could see and hear their cheers about every 5 miles. Read more about the exciting marathon by reading Jason's report and Leah's report

Thank you to the Catalina Fleet 21 in Chicago for inviting us to speak about our first year experience as cruising sailors. It was fun to share our route and some memorable moments along the way. It was great to see so many friends, old and new, and to meet Stan from San Diego! Thanks for coming one and all!!

Plans are afoot for returning to the Keys and from there across to the Bahamas. The boat is in good shape and the crew is getting pretty antsy. Once under way, expect more frequent and, hopefully, more interesting blog updates. In the meantime Sue is working on making ‘awnings’ for our bimini top. It is barely as wide than the cockpit so when it rains the bimini actually funnels the rain into the cockpit. Sue is making 30” snap on extensions for those rainy days at anchor. Scott is trying to get a publisher for a book he is working on called Sailing Through Physics. He has one positive response from a publisher and looking for more responses in a few days.

Thanks to all our faithful readers and like your standing rigging.... STAY TUNED!