April 9th: Adjusting to "Stay at Home"

After Spring Break, our Monroe County leaders made the great decision to close the Keys to nonresidents and mandate all motels, hotels, and restaurants close.  The Sheriff's department and city law enforcement officers are manning a 24/7 road block keeping people out. There are only two roads coming in which really helps. As of today, there are only 52 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the Keys - with 3 in Marathon.

The first week they stopped over 2,000 cars from coming in. We believe we are in a good place and practicing the safety measures. The hoarding seems to have subsided with the Keys closing down. We had heard that a lot of people were coming from Miami to get supplies. The grocery stores were being supplied daily but it seemed like there were a lot more people in the stores than usual. It's much better now. We seldom need to leave the marina and it has been easy to keep a safe distance from others when I need to get something. We are able to kayak, which has been a great way to keep exercising.

Sometimes it seems like time is standing still, but then I wonder how it got to be April 9th! I decided I have been neglecting the blog so over the next few days I will do several to catch up.

As I mentioned previously, I needed to clean the oil out of the bilge. It is not a fun job but it needed to be done. It involves a lot of wiping, cleaning and using the wet vacuum to capture all the oil and soapy water.

Oil from the bilge

The most difficult part about the job is getting under and around the engine. My body keeps telling me it doesn't fit down there!

At any rate I managed to get things cleaned up and sucked up all the oily water. Then I let it sit long enough for the oil to float to the top. Take the oil off the top and dump it into the empty oil gallon jugs. Then it goes to the auto parts store for recycling. I was happy to have that job completed.

London

Trevi

Rebecca sent some fun pictures of Trevi and London. We wish we could be in California as planned but at least we get pictures. I think they miss us!

11 year old dinghy

Just before we went on the Horseshoe Key anchoring trip, my dinghy bit the dust. It was a sad day. It's 11 years old. I repaired a few leaks over the last couple years and painted it with rubberized paint to keep it going. But when I came out that morning and saw, this I knew it was over. One of the major seems split open. It served me very well and lasted longer than is typical.


I thought about waiting until next year to replace it but someone told me West Marine had a great sale on them. Fortunately, they had one in stock and it was 30 per cent off.


Flint helped me pick it up at West Marine with his truck and several people helped me get it to our boat on a dock cart. Nice to have friends.



We carefully lowered it into the water and tied it up in front of our boat.

Very bright  new dinghy

It is very white and clean looking. Don't know how I'm going to keep  it that way but I'll try.







 The temperatures have been getting pretty warm. This 1/2 empty gasoline jug was opened and then closed when it was quite hot and in the sun. I was surprised the next morning by how much the jug shrank over night due to the cooler temperature. It only went down to 71 degrees. Must have gotten really hot! Definitely an air tight jug.





We are still getting many beautiful sunsets. Dennis and Lois came out to see this one and I got a nice silhouette picture of them from our Fly bridge.

Dennis and Lois at the point