2006.12.19 North Palm Beach FL
Swinging from a hook a very typically cruising expression… being at anchor!

One has a sense of total autonomy, seclusion and privacy… it is at the same time a feeling of power,,, here you are running your own little home and managing all it needs to function…heat, if need be (thank God we don’t need it any longer), refrigeration, electricity, running water, hot water, propane for cooking and of course fuel to run the bloody beast…. All the things that one takes for granted at home are things we need to monitor, conserve and use wisely …how many amps does this light use or charging this computer or cell phone…we need to fuel up, top up and pump out on a regular basis… and now D has informed me that Santa is thinking of a little generator as a Xmas present to us and Soli so we can be more autonomous…the water maker is next….and at the same time it is a very humbling feeling as we move through nature and admire the wonder and power of it .

I have an Exel file with all the provisions on board and codes as to where they are located, I finished a jar of jam this morning at breakfast and my baby Dell told me I had another one in P7, that is locker #7 on port side of the boat… now I wish I was that organized at home!
We are going provisioning tomorrow and I am taking that list to tell me what NOT to buy…

Enough philosophizing …we are swinging from our hook in a nice anchorage with lots of other boats in North Palm Beach, Florida…. We have done another 46 nautical miles today and actually crossed the 1000 mile mark on the ICW…. Almost popped the Champagne bottle open!

We again crossed a lot of bridges, which had to be opened for us and our fellow cruisers, the etiquette in addressing the bridge master (and in many cases the bridge mistress) is very nice and courteous … one said to D, “You do this very well… you’ve done it before haven’t you”.

Today Jacqueline and I were chatting on the VHF, with our charts and guide books and were trying to select a suitable anchorage for this evening…this is a daily thing we do.. and these two guys in trawlers “AJ” and “One screw” started talking to us… they were locals to a place we wanted to go to … Stuart, and they told us about a wonderful anchorage and how to get there… as it so happened there was not enough water (depth) for us to get through the channel to the Lucie River which is too bad…it sounded very nice and we had some friends to visit there.

The skipper has just informed me it is time to go to sleep, he has glanced across the anchorage and all the lights on L’Equipe are out… so g’nite y’all.