Harbor Happenings

Marathon, Florida
24 42.40 081 N 05.68 W

I just made an appointment to haul the boat this Thursday.  It will be a quick in-and-out.  Haul at 11:30, remove the old maxprop, and put the new propeller on and splash at 13:00.  Wish us luck.

On Saturday they held a charity auction up at the tiki hut.  The auction was to benefit the Relay For Life cancer research fund.   Libby and I didn't have anything we wanted to buy.  We're more in the mode of trying to shed things on the boat than acquiring new ones.  However, Libby donated a pine needle basket, and Tarwathie donated an anchor, a WiFi booster, and a DC-AC inverter.  We were curious about how much money they would fetch.  The turnout was disappointing.  There were only about 30 people bidding.  Nevertheless, the auction raised $2200 for Relay For Life which made it a great success.   Libby and I got bored watching after 2 hours and left.

On Sunday, I attended a political meeting at the tiki hut.  It had to do with the proposed city ordinance about anchoring, and in the larger picture eventually anchoring rights for anywhere in Florida.  In short, the proposed ordinance would spoil Boot Key Harbor as a destination in our opinion. We are operating under the gun.  Using shrewd parliamentary tactics, the city council is giving us only about a week to organize, and produce alternatives to their suggested restrictions on anchoring in and around Boot Key Harbor.   Man, politics is difficult.  We had about 25 people there with about 50 ideas as to which direction we should go.  One man would say, "We can't shotgun them with ideas.  We must focus on 1 or 2 points."  The next man would say the opposite, "We all need to write letters to councilmen and our congressmen."   Without a leader or a procedure to resolve which path to follow, nothing could get done.  A third man wanted to make an organisation with officers, a board, bylaws and all -- clearly something with long term value, but irrelevant to what we could get done in the next 72 hours.  Never before have I been involved with actual politics at any level.  It is really hard even among a group of like-minded people with similar goals in mind.