Carelessness

Matanzas Inlet
29 43.02 N 081 14.48 W

My excuse for doing stupid things is that I need material that entertains my blog readers.  Well yesterday I delivered.

We anchored in the Matanzas River with the idea of walking the beautiful nature trails and beaches.  We took the dinghy ashore to do that.  I tossed the dinghy anchor in because we would beach it on sand and I didn't want it to wash away on a rising tide.  When we got to the beach I judged that the tide was already past high.  Instead of anchoring the dinghy, I tied it off to a sign post.  Well, when we returned an hour later it was gone.  OH NO!!!

I can't believe I was so careless and that I did so when the dinghy anchor was only an arm's length away.   It's all for you blog readers ;)

However, good fortune was smiling on us that day.   It just happened that a uniformed park ranger was near by.  He was Andrew, manager of the Matanzas National Monument park.   I told him about the missing dinghy.  He went searching in his car, while Libby and I walked the shorelines searching.  We were all afraid with the falling tide that it would be sucked out to sea.  Nothing found.

Then Andrew theorized that it would drift in the strong wind.  He pointed to a place about 1.5 miles across the bay.  "Let's go in my truck and look there," he said.  When did so, and when we got there Andrew spotted our dinghy tied up to a private dock behind a house.   WOW!  We drove to the house and knocked.  Nobody home.  But the neighbor came out and said, "Yes.  The homeowner Dave saw it drifting past and tied it up."     So now we are reunited with our dinghy and very grateful.    If anybody says anything bad about Floridians, I'll remind them about Andrew and Dave.

By the way, the trails and beaches were beautiful.  I took lots of pictures.  I'll post some of them soon.

p.s. My daughter Jenny has her own blog now.  See it here.   It seems that Jenny and her friend Christian partnered and bought a library.  It was a branch of the Winooski Vermont Public Library that fell unused.   They bought it from the village and their project is to transform it into a single-family dwelling for resale.  We hope they earn a ton of money doing that.  Anyhow, Jenny's great idea was to document the library transformation process on a blog.  Cool.