Ready for the Cold

Vero Beach (wikimap)
27 39.646N 080 22.224

Well, we're as ready as we can be. Tomorrow we fly to Fairbanks Alaska to spend Thankgiving with Dave and his family. Dave says it is about 10F (-12C) there. Brrrrrrr. The Floridians down here think that we're lunatics for considering it. Actually, we're looking forward to having a great time.

I probably won't blog from Alaska. This is a sailing blog, not a family blog.

This morning we witnessed a spectacle from 50 feet away. A couple in a big 45 foot sailboat came up to take the mooring just behind us. The wind speed was almost zero. They picked up the mooring pennant OK and made it fast, but their boat still had some forward momentum so it pulled tight and turned around stern to the wind.

Then, to our amazement, the captain of that boat jumped in to his dinghy and tried to make it act like a tug boat to push the sail boat back to proper alighment, pointing the same way as everyone else. He tried from the bow and from the stern using full throttle on the outboard. Meanwhile, his wife was on deck yelling at him an berating him about what he was doing. Libby and I and all the other cruisers within earshot just stood by gawking.

What he was hoping to accomplish I don't know. He didn't need to do anything at all. If he just waited 10 minutes or so, his boat would swing in to the wind just like everyone else. Remember how I've written several times about how hard it was to learn patience on board? Well, this poor guy had the impatience bug much worse than I ever did. The couple reminded me of Milton Berle and Ethel Merman in the old movie "Its a Mad Mad World"; remember that?