Day 144: Saturday, January 26, 2013

Port to Port: Fort Myers Beach

Underway: 0:00 am      Motor Off: 0:00 pm      Miles Traveled: 0      Stayed At: Marina

First Things First: First two Happy Hour day – lunch and dinner.

Mile to Mile: We couldn’t get the dinghy motor started yesterday so the first project for the day was to find out why. Well, the first clue was the smell – there was a strong gas smell and a large shimmering rainbow colored halo surrounded the dinghy. All the gas I put in yesterday day leaked out into the river overnight. A pretty good clue that the carburetor float was stuck open causing the gas to just siphon through and flood the engine. So I took off the carburetor, cleaned it and reassembled everything (again without losing any parts) – surprise, surprise, it started the first pull.

I decided the dinghy bottom needed to be scrapped and cleaned too so I could try to find the leak in the floor. This turned out to be a surprisingly long and involved project. I forgot to take a picture but the 3 weeks of growth on the dinghy bottom was amazing – an entire ecosystem of razor sharp barnacles, some kind of seaweed and even a crab or two were living on the bottom of our little dinghy. It took a couple hours, lots of elbow grease and some handy chemicals to dissolve the barnacle “glue” and the bottom was clean again (and probably 20 lbs lighter). Now I just have to fix the persistent leak in the bottom.

Eddy and Linda dinghied up at a little after 11 am while I was finishing cleaning the dinghy. While Cindy and Linda wandered down to the Post Office, Eddy “dragged” me up to Pete’s – the bar on the second floor of Matanzas Restaurant for a beer. Well, the live band on the deck downstairs was so good and we were having so much fun chatting we finally left for our walk 2 buckets of beer, a large pizza and three hours later.

We went over bridge to explore the other side of the channel where the shrimp boats, several restaurants and some seafood markets are located. Bonita Bills was a hopping place where hundreds of the mostly over 60 crowd were enjoying the dock-front bar scene.     More than 16,000 steps later, we were a little famished after our long winding walk and, after craving chicken wings all week (and having a new wing man in Eddy), we ended up at the Lani Kai for Happy Hour on the roof to watch the sunset, a rare simultaneous moonrise and even a wedding on the beach at sunset. The sunset was beautiful, the wings were great and the company amazing – a top ten evening – and the day wasn’t even done yet. We came back to Aurora and picked up the computer and the movie Once and turned the library/laundry room into a makeshift movie theatre – the only thing missing was the popcorn.  A fun time was had by all.