Friday, January 08, 2010 Vero Beach

While the morning was cool, the day warmed up to the upper 60s. It felt heaven sent after the string of cold weather. Tomorrow it’s supposed to plunge back into the 20s and 30s at night with a high in the 40s. But for today, I’ll enjoy the warmth. Someone said that we were in that cycle of every 5 years of crop devastation for Florida. I can believe it.

Winfield Lash on her mooring.

Marge & Dave the First Mate & Captain :)

We dinghied over to Winfield Lash for coffee and found out that today is Marge’s birthday! She shares it with Elvis :) So we sang a shortened rendition of Happy Birthday to her. It was nice to finally get to meet her and Dave. I feel like I’ve known her for a while. She and my daughter Stephanie worked together and Steph is quite fond of her. When I heard that Marge was retiring and going sailing, I was sooo hoping we’d catch up with each other :) I’m glad that we finally did! We chatted for a couple of hours and I had to take pictures of the boat. It’s a wonderful schooner. Dave spent 18 years in building the Winfield Lash. The custom touches like the granite counters, artistic backing board for the sink, deck prisms to allow light below, various hardwoods that he used on the boat, the fittings and binnacle of a bare-breasted lass that were cast from his molds, show his schooner to be a labor of love.

After coffee and visiting with Dave and Marge, we caught the bus into town to pick up our running lights from West Marine and do a bit more provisioning for the boat. We can only carry so much each trip, that it’s going to be multiple trips to bring back the bulky stuff like toilet paper and paper towels. It was such a blessing for Patti & John to run us around for the heavy stuff (can’t thank you two enough)! We missed the bus back again by 5 minutes so had to wait for the next one. We people watched and chatted with a fella that was interested in how we live on a boat. This was after we had a discussion on a squirrel that was trying to figure out if he had anything good to eat in his shopping cart. He gave us a few tips on how to catch Mahi before he caught a ride with someone.

By the time we got back to the marina, the sky looked threatening, so Wayne didn’t get his planned haircut in the park today. It’s threatening rain and it feels like the temperature is dropping again. At least we had one pleasant day :)