Day 109: Saturday, December 22, 2012
Port to Port: Fort Myers, Florida
Underway: 0:03 am Motor Off: 00:00 pm Miles Traveled: 0 Stayed At: Marina
First Things First: First palm tree farms – miles and miles of them on Pine Island; First giant flea market.
Mile to Mile: After a good nights’ sleep we were ready to get some work done first and then see where the day took us. We spent time (again) purging stuff we have decided we don’t need or haven’t used in the nearly 4 months we have been travelling. There always seems to be be too much stuff. We need to get rid of some weight before the girls visit and add several hundred more pounds for a couple of days. They are planning to stay on the boat for their first two days at the beach and then move to a house they rented nearby. We decluttered and are sending at least 200 pounds of stuff home. For now, we just stacked some bins and extra gas cans on the dock temporarily to make room for our overnight guests.
We have a car so we have to drive somewhere right? Our first stop was a big new West Marine store on the way to downtown Fort Myers. We need a few things to fix our anchor light and improve our living conditions. We were lucky to get out of there for a little over $100 – one boat buck by our definition. Powerboaters down here define a boat buck as $1,000 so we count ourselves lucky. The next stop was a giant fleamarket in Fort Myers – about 15 miles away. We don’t “need” anything but you never know what you might find that solves a problem on the boat. After passing by more than 900 individual booths, Cindy did find some individual silicone muffin cups she has been looking for since we left Minnesota (we are trying to perfect our baking technique and these may help) and we bought some fresh grapefruit and strawberries to add to our fresh food stores. We could have bought a kitchen sink if we had needed one but decided to save that for some other time.
Our next stop was an impromptu visit with Bob and Marilyn in Bokeelia, Florida at the northern tip of Pine Island. They are the parents of one of our neighbors – Paul – a couple houses down from us in Minnesota. Bob and his brother did the Loop on a powerboat named Fuddy Duddy in 3-4 weeks segments over a period of years. We were hoping to get a chance to visit while in the Fort Myers area and luckily we were able to connect. We had a wonderful afternoon visiting with them and talking about some of our mutual adventures. They live in a nice town house with water on boat sides and wonderful natural views over the channel areas – I can see why they like it here so much. Marilyn is an amazing artist and the walls of their home are covered with her paintings and those of other local artists. We didn’t want leave and may come back by boat to visit again.
After a long drive home, we spent a few minutes packing and putting up some Christmas lights to surprise the girls and crashed after another busy day on the Loop.