Sunday March 3: Bad Weather - Great Friends :-)

A bird's eye view of Banana Bay marina - well actually a view from the top of sailboat Marquesa's mast! Karyn took pictures while she was up there stringing a new line and kindly allowed me to post it here. Yesterday's Dream is circled in red. Thanks, Karyn!!

Where does the time go .... really....  So I will expound on what many of you have heard already. The Franko Theory of Time: the swiftness of the passage of time is directly proportional to an individual's age. So the older you are, the faster time passes. Reason, you ask? Because, for example, when you are 4 years old, 1 year is a whopping 25% of your life! By the time you reach the age of 50, 1 year is a minuscule 2% of your life - hence it passes much faster relative to the amount of time you have already experienced :-) That's my story and I'm stickin' to it ...

The weather since we were out last weekend was very hot: like 85 and so humid the air conditioner ran most of the day. I spent the day working on computer stuff and Steve spent the day working outside.

The best project completed was finally marking the anchor line. Every 15 feet, Steve put a mark on the line with permanent magic marker. What this does is let us know how much anchor line we have actually let out.

Ideally, the ratio of anchor line to depth (including the height of the front of the bow above the water) is usually 7:1. Mostly we would just kind of let line out until we thought that enough was out :-) Before this appalls anyone, we are very conservative anchorers. Which means it needs to be pretty calm weather predicted for the night. And we always power the boat backwards to allow the anchor to really dig in.

But on to the fun part of this past week: a visit from Laura (Cleveland) and Barbara (St. Petersburg, FL). What a BLAST!! Both are fellow educators from the Cleveland area in their past lives.

After a late arrival Thursday night, we headed off to Key West on Friday. The weather was not nice and predicted to get worse. (Note the rain poncho Steve has from the Conch Train Tour).

But we managed to see all of the sites including Sloppy Joe's (Earnest Hemingway's hangout) and Mallory Square (even though it was so cloudy staying for the sunset was out).

Lunch was at the Turtle Kraals restaurant (a kraal is an enclosure used to raise turtles) and was a great find by Steve.

The Conch Tour was very informative and a great way to get an overview of the city of Key West.

Best thing of course at lunch was the desert: how can anyone come to Key West and not have a slice of key lime pie?

Very nice presentation - although I have to say it didn't last long with four forks working at it :-)





After a fun night of catching up on Friday, it was off Saturday for a bit of sight seeing. After a stop at the Turtle Hospital, we headed west to Bahia Honda State Park.

Laura had been here in high school and remembered camping at the campgrounds on site.

This was her opportunity to step into the Atlantic Ocean and she took advantage of it! What fun!


Once back to the boat the sun came out for a moment and the winds died so Steve and Laura took that as a sign that it must be time to go kayaking! Crazy people. Who would go kayaking in jeans and a sweatshirt???

All was well until the wind shifted and picked up! Talk about two people looking like drowned rats :-) The waves just washed right over the front of the kayaks and drenched them.

By the time it was evening the sun had ducked behind clouds again and there was no sunset to be had :-( And the winds continued to blow with no change in sight.

Dinner was at Dave and Joyce's (Joysea) condo. They were so gracious to again invite us and our friends over for dinner! It was a great time (as it always is :-) ).

Euchre followed once back to the boat - it was pretty evenly matched but what a good time we had. Laughing until we were crying ... these two are such fun! We totally love these guys :-)

Sadly, Sunday was time for 'see you later' rather than goodbye. Barb is on spring break and due back to work next week and Laura is headed on back to Cleveland at some point. She's due to be a grandmother for the first time at the end of May and definitely does not want to miss that!!

The gorgeous sunset tonight must have been for them as they made their way north to St. Augustine!

But it was still very cold and wind - it just doesn't look like it. Next time we'll get a boat ride in .....