Day 182: Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Port to Port: Fort Myers, Florida
Underway: 0:00 am Motor Off: 0:00 pm Miles Traveled: 0 Stayed At: Marina
Mile to Mile: Since we might get moving again as early as Thursday, today was project day. It didn’t hurt that is was sunny and comfortable which makes working on boat projects much more enjoyable. We started the day, though, trying out a small Cuban restaurant we saw on one of our walks that advertised a $3.50 breakfast deal – 3 eggs, bacon, toast and a drink – energy for a hard days work. The view wasn’t as good as the Lani Kai but the breakfast was a bargain.
For whatever reason, I was motivated to clean the boat – the waterline looks disgusting and the rest of the boat needs a nice scrubbing. Each time we clean the boat we try to fix or improve one more thing on the boat to make it a little nicer to live on. This time I scrubbed all the bumpers – they are now bright white instead of a mix of rust, black grime and orange slime streaks – and I fixed one that has a small leak. We cleaned the floor in the salon, scrubbed the cockpit and cleaned mold off our inflatable life preservers, too. Oh, the easy life of the Great Looper.
After cleaning, it was time to finish the dinghy lift project. It took about 2 hours to drill, lash and tie everything together but it looks like it may work pretty good – a great deal for $5 plus a few dollars in hardware. I will test it tomorrow with the dinghy.
I also cleaned and modified the rudder. When we are motoring there is a little play in the rudder and tiller that annoyingly wobbles back and forth. I added a large, thin, plastic washer (made from a plastic cover) to replace a smaller, thicker metal washer on the rudder – this joint seems to be a lot tighter now. I did something similar on the tiller – hopefully this will fix the problem.
We still had energy left, so we decided to check two more projects off our list late in the day – we did laundry and went for a walk downtown after dark. We are almost ready to go now – just a few more internet projects to work on – and maybe another visit to a favorite restaurant before we leave. The countdown begins.
