Wednesday Feb 6: Where to Begin?

Today: 8 new knuckles and a screw fused in each thumb!
Like new hands - what an amazing thing :-)

Probably the best place to begin is at the end. We returned from a trip back to the Cleveland Clinic in Coral Springs today after seeing Dr. Friedman for what we thought would be the last visit.

Turns out he wants one last x-ray to verify the thumb fusion on the right hand has totally finished healing. In the meantime he ok'd me to stop wearing the splint that has been my main accessory since December :-)

But light duty only he said. Steve is taking that to mean doing dishes is fine!!

March 2017: Left hand with thumb and 1 working finger. Right
hand with 4 new knuckles but still a bad thumb

Dec 2016: Both hands had a working
thumb and 1 working finger

It's been an interesting trip - starting in Jan 2017 and soon to be ending in March 2019!

The award for the most support through out this 2 year long process goes of course to Steve. I never heard even a hint of displeasure at having to tie my shoes, do the cooking AND cleaning up the dishes, helping me get dressed when needed, making the 2 1/2 drives to the Clinic for surgeries or checkups, the hour drives to Key West for the hand therapy and basically making the care of this boat and Guppy into a one person job - his.

So that's the end of the story. Backing up a few days: we were FINALLY able to head out for a couple of days to anchor out and enjoy the best weather of the past month.

You know it's cold when Steve had his knitted socks (gift from daughter Wendy) along with a heater up on the flybridge with all of the plasic up!

It was quite a few nights this past month that drove us to the enclosed flybridge for docktails as this was the coldest, windiest Jan ever!

But finally, we were able to enjoy the sunny, calm mid to high seventies for a few days on the bayside.

After leaving Saturday about noon, we were about 5 miles from Banana Bay when the dolphins showed up! There were four of them having fun in the bow wave or in the wave along either side of the boat.

Steve saw what must have been a baby as they were in the very front of the boat.

We continued to travel west to the selected anchorage of Bahia Honda.

Randy and Cindy arrived first (thanks for the picture!!) and found the "sand bar" which was already several inches under water.

Dennis and Lois on Mystified joined us for the overnight as well. Everyone was on the sand bar at one point or another even though the longer we spend on the sand bar the more in the water we were! Umbrellas came out as the day wore on and the sun was really strong.

Randy, Cindy, Gigit and Cricket arrive for docktails.

The day was finished off on Yesterday's Dream flybridge as docktails started on time just after 5 pm.

Wind was predicted to be very low overnight - which it was! So peaceful and being more away from the light pollution of Marathon made the stars more visible than we've seen in quite some time.

The morning was so peaceful ....

And off they went to go fishing under the bridge! Steve, Cindy and Lois were after whatever they could catch! It was so nice being anchored so close to the highway bridge near the state park.


It was a good day for fishing as it turned out! Two Porgies, excellent eating, a Mangrove snapper and 3 grunts. All are very tasty for eating and with the electric knife, Steve has become very proficient cleaning them quickly!


Sunday the anchor was up and off we went to the docks at Bahia Honda State Park - it was, after all, Superbowl night and we needed to be tied up in order to watch the game.

We lowered our mast but Randy and Cindy thought they would be fine. So we carefully monitored their progress under the bridge - no problem with clearance!!

The super bowl was a dud as far as we thought. Just not terribly interesting but we had splurged with our eating habits and had a pizza :-)  All was good ....

Hurricane Irma in Sept 2017 really devastated this area. The marina never even opened last year and the grounds took a huge hit.

Steve went to a ranger talk where the woman (who has been at this park 18 years) talked about the impact being greater than any other hurricane that has come through in that time.

The ocean side beach and it's onshore mangroves were simply gone. Whether the mangroves will begin growing again is unknown.

The beach on the ocean side was covered with sea grass and a sign nearby explained why.

The ranger had also explained why the seagrass is so important to the area along the shore returning to it's previous state.

We've had lots of manatee visitors to the marina this winter - seems like more than usual but probably not!


There were a number of fishing trips from the marina to the seven-mile bridge. Steve and Cindy were headed out this day - can't remember if this was a good day or not but for the most part, the trips were successful!




When Steve wasn't fishing this month, he was working on a couple of soft spots on the deck. It's a very time consuming process since each layer of fiberglass has to harden before being able to add the next layer.

Eventually the layers are built up enough to be level with the rest of the deck.



These places on the deck will be finished off using raptor truck-bedliner - the end result will look great! And won't leak :-)













Coolest fish caught this past month? A hogfish caught by Cindy. Excellent to eat but sadly not big enough so back it went :-)