December 27, 2015 Church and groceries

This morning, I took the dinghy over to Old Port Cove marina.  Bob gave me a ride to a Catholic church about 2 miles from them.  It was just across the lake from their marina and our boat.  But that shore is all private property, so there isn’t a place to land the dinghy.  After church, I walked a mile back to the Publix grocery store.  You always think you are done provisioning and only need milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables.  But somehow I end up with a cart full of groceries. 

Christmas decorations in the neighborhood of the church

Here’s something I thought of in advance.  I bought a birthday card for my Aunt Dorothy who will be 100 in February.  I wrote on it and sent it to her son with a note to give it to her on her birthday.  I don’t think I would send one from the Bahamas.  She is in a nursing home, has some dementia, but is actually pretty healthy. 

Bob came to pick me up.  Then we loaded everything in the dinghy, and I headed back to the boat.  There Dave helped unload.  Then I have more work ahead of me.  We have to bag a lot of the foods, label the cans, then tuck things away. 

Dave cleaned our fuel today with our fuel polisher.  It takes a couple hours to run the fuel through it.  He cleaned some muck out of the fuel filter.  He checked the generator to see if there was any water leaking, as it did last spring.  Everything was fine.  He also checked the generator fuel filter.  He spent some time working on our fuel gauge.  It hasn’t been reliable.  After checking several things, the next test was to be done when you have an empty tank.  Well, we never have an empty tank.  So we will have to go by how many hours we run the engine. 

Dave also put away our fenders and dock lines today.  We don’t plan to be at a dock for the next 6 months.  He also ran our jack lines today.  He runs two lines from the cockpit to the bow, one on port and one starboard.  If you go forward on the boat when we are out to sea, you hook your life vest into this line to keep you from getting tossed overboard. 

We had a light dinner of appetizers while listening to the Packers lose their game-so sad.  We didn’t even listen to the end.  We thought we may as well save our power.  Final score 38-8 :(