Heading West

As to be expected, our plans have changed. We last left you with the plan that we would get a mooring ball in Fort Myers for a month when I returned from Texas, well that's changed.

 Just before leaving on the 11^th, we began throwing around ideas to escape the heat for the summer; last year we went north on the rediscover America road trip. With record heat predicted this summer and my being stuck to the interior of Sanibel five days a week, we decided to put Sanibel on dry dock and head for Nebraska. We’ll stay with my parents for the summer. It will still be hot, but we’ll have climate control indoors to escape the heat.

Our favorite little frozen yogurt shop.

Build your own with eight flavors and over 40 toppings to choose from.

When finished, set you cup on the scale to get weighed...pay and then eat away.

Jimi kept busy while I was in Texas: He found several busted bolts in the aft bulkhead and replaced them all with larger bolts; there were about eight in total. He scrubbed and shined the stainless on the bow and all around the windlass, he repaired the grill after the mount broke and it fell over and he rebuilt our speer guns and mounted them on the wall in a safe place. With added solar panels, we haven’t used the wind generator in a while, so he removed it and its mounting from the mizzen mast. He’s hoping the fifty pounds removed will reduce weather helm and heeling. He also managed a little interior decorating when he mounted his collection of license plates to one of the Head doors. The work and room for improvement on a sailboat never ends.

A small piece of our travels.

The speer guns are now mounted in a holder for safe storage out of the way. 

Despite my many attempts to avoid it, I celebrated another birthday.  Jimi gave me a Widow’s Mite coin embedded in a sterling silver casing on a chain. This coin is over 2,000 years old originally called a Mite and now known as the Widow’s Mite from the story in the bible mentioned in both Mark 12: 41-44 and Luke 21: 1-4. It’s a spectacular gift.

The front of the coin is a star (I previously called it a sun ray). It's off center; as you might imagine, they were made by hand, probably by slaves. Not much in the way of perfection was put in to them, making each one unique. Later they were discarded and used as weights in the keel of a boat. 

The back side is a picture of an anchor, as the community survived off the fishing industry.

We've had a lot of dolphin activity lately, but this morning we were totally surrounded.

We enjoy watching the dolphins, but they are difficult to capture in a snapshot.

It was a nasty job, but don't fear, Jimi took care of it. This is actually our anchor chain with about two inches of fur grown in. This has only been three weeks worth.

We’re now preparing Sanibel for storage and getting ourselves ready for our journey to the mid-west.