Hetty Brace Ship’s Log

February 2001

 

Greetings from the Coast!  We are finally getting close enough to start thinking about taking off in October and not having the time frame be depressing.  Seven months – that’s do-able, right?  For me it is as long as I don’t think about the long, hot Florida summer that we have to cross to get there.

 

The new owner of our store takes over in March and soon I’ll be working full time getting Hetty ready to cruise.  We’re in pretty good shape right now but there are a few huge projects that we should’ve done before our last cruise.  The biggest and nastiest is re-wiring the boat.  We’ve added a bunch of electronics to Hetty over the years and the initially inadequate wiring has become an unworkable mass.  The best way to fix the problem is to completely rip out what we have and start from scratch with a good wiring plan.  That will not be a pretty job.  It will be so bad that we’ll probably have to move off the boat for a few days while the worst of it is progress.  Other than that, we have to touch up the paint on the deck and Cetol all of the outside wood.  We’d also like to re-varnish the interior but that’s not gonna happen as long as the fur-spewing mammals are aboard.

 

Let’s see, what’s happening around this place.  First of all, this isn’t a marina it’s an asylum.  Between pajama wearing dogs and psycho attack cats that grin at you, well, it’s a bit weird around here.  The marina population has changed a lot lately.  A lot more liveaboards and fewer with cruising plans.  The other day Michelle heard an alarm sounding from a boat on the next dock.  The owner is a friend of ours and though he’s in his 70’s, he’s as healthy as a horse.  He’s also quite insane but that’s another story.  Well, by the next morning the alarm was still going off and we hadn’t seen our friend yet.  Michelle asks me to go over to check to make sure he’s OK.  To paraphrase a friend of ours who once said, “I didn’t go cruising to have to shoot at people” - I didn’t move aboard a boat to have to look for dead people.  This is the third time in the past few years that she’s asked me to check to see if someone was lying dead in they’re boat.  Two of those times had a happy ending – fortunately this last time was one of the happy ones.  Our friend is a bit hard of hearing so didn’t notice the alarm going off until minutes before we got there.  When we arrived at his boat he had just finished ripping his new smoke detector apart with his bare hands to get it to shut up.

 

I’ve realized the past few days that perhaps Randy Wayne White’s novels centered in Southwest Florida may not be fiction.  I look around the cast of characters hanging around the marina or the store and it’s as if they walked out of the pages of one of his books.  Florida is often the bottom of the barrel – people that don’t fit in somewhere else finally wind up down here at the bottom of the country.  Key West, of course, is where the road ends and is the absolute bottom of that barrel.  This is not necessarily a bad thing – most of the people I’m referring to just don’t fit into the suburban/corporate mold that is often described as the “American Dream”.  Makes for some colorful characters and interesting friends.

 

From the muck in the bottom of the barrel, fair winds from the Captain and crew of Hetty Brace!