What Do Cruisers Do All Day?

Marathon, Florida
24 42.40 081 N 05.68 W 


Let me count the ways.

1. Sunday, lunch with friends.
2. Monday, Dick volunteer a the library.  Dinner with friends.
3. Tuesday, lunch with visitors from Schenectady.
4. Wednesday, Libby volunteer at the library.  Pot luck dinner at the marina, Libby does Tai Chi with Bob & Sandra.
5. Thursday, movie night at the Tiki Hut
6. Friday, SSCA luncheon
7. Saturday, farmer's market
8. Sunday, I clean the bottom of the dinghy, Libby does laundry, we both fill the water tanks.
9. Softball once per week, tennis every day
10. Bacci ball once per week
11. Yoga three times per week.
12. Tuesdays: seminars and courses on things nautical
13. Community Theater, amateur plays.  Bob  & Sandra volunteer there
14. Star gazing.  We try to catch every ISS flyover and every Irridium Flash
15. Fishing, snorkeling, bathing at the beach.
16. Every third week, mosey on down to Burdines to buy gasoline for the generator and the outboard.
17. There are numerous restaurants in town with great $5 lunch menues.
18. People go to Dockside or Burdines at night for a few beers and live music.  Both places can be reached by dinghy.
19. Libby's Pine Needle Basket class on Mondays, other crafts at the marina on Tuesdays.
20. Ham radio club, Great Loop Cruiser's Club, Toastmasters Club.
21. Book discussions and lectures at the library.  Nature films at a local church.
22. On the cruiser's net, people make open invitations for mexican train dominoes, or Balderdash games.
23. Last Sunday was a Superbowl party at the marina.
24. Blah blah, many more.

All the above are in addition to boat projects.  My list of to-do projects it bottomless.

Do you remember the Eileen Quinn song, Tarpit Harbor?   Her lyrics were dead on.


TARPIT HARBOUR 


Well the holding is good 
and the water's pretty clean 
it's an easy dinghy ashore 
the French bread is fresh 
and the laundry is cheap 
there's a well stocked hardware store 
feels so familiar, almost like home 
and I can't quite remember
what I left home for 


Chorus:
Tarpit Harbour
has sucked down my anchor
and with it my will to be free
there's some what goes sailing
I seem to go anchoring 
stuck in the muck this side of the sea.


Monday there's movies 
Tuesdays the potluck
Wednesdays I play volleyball
there's the luncheon on Thursday 
happy hour Fridays 
Saturday the market's 
got my favorite stall
Sundays I look at my list of boat projects
then lie down and try to recover from it all


Chorus: tarpit harbour ....


well I'd have been long gone 
if I hadn't been waiting
on boat parts from overseas
now my tools are all rusted 
autopilot's busted
and the freezer refuses to freeze
but I would have remedied 
all of these problems 
if I wasn't so busy shooting the breeze 

Why Marathon

Marathon, Florida
24 42.40 081 N 05.68 W


I'm not the only one who can write.  My friend Bob just posted a really good post about Marathon.  Instead of reading my stuff today, read Bob's here.  I recommend it. 

Captain Jack's 90th

Marathon, Florida
24 42.40 081 N 05.68 W 


Captain Jack is one of Book Key Harbor's most beloved residents.  He has been here on the keys, living on a boat, since the 1950s.  Today he is 90 and he's still doing it. Surprisingly, the women told me they don't mind.  I wish I could get away with that.


Jack also has plenty of stories to tell as you might imagine.  He knows volumes about Keys history.


I took Jack to lunch last week.  He told me how he got here.  Jack was sailing past the keys one day long long ago when a terrible storm came up.   Unable to make way to weather, he dropped hook on the reef.  Normally, that's not a good thing to do.  It damages the coral.  It also leaves you in on a shoal where the waves double or triple in size.  Anyhow, Jack kneeled on the floor hanging on to hand holds on either side and made it through the night.  When he went out in the morning after the storm has passed, his rudder was gone.  He couldn't go anywhere. [remind me to tell you my story about the day my rudder broken with my father on board] He had to get towed to the nearest place which happened to be Marathon.  He's been here on a boat ever since.  He earned a living running a dive boat out of Marathon.


This week, the cruisers in the harbor did well by Captain Jack.  At the Wednesday Pot Luck dinner, they had a big birthday cake for Jack.  Today we had Jack as the guest of honor at the weekly SSCA luncheon.  49 people were there.   The cruisers in the harbor gave him a special present -- a calendar for February marking 11 invites to Jack to go to lunch.   Anybody who manages to still live on a boat in paradise at the ripe old age of 90, (including all the infirmaries that come with it) earns our respect and admiration.


Jack also told me that there once was a very nice fresh water spring east of Boot Key Harbor.  There was also a fresh water lake there filled with flamingos and other exotic birds.  Then, they went and built a plaza for the Winn Dixie supermarket.  Stores in the plaza had septic fields that polluted the spring.  Then the polluted spring spoiled the lake too.  Eventually they filled in the lake to make a place for a Publix store and its parking lot.  Boy, I sure would have liked to have seen this place before so many people arrived.


Happy Birthday Captain Jack.

Jack at the Wednesday Pot Luck Dinner

Cutting the cake

Jack's boat and home

Jack at the SSCA Lunch

The crowd at the SSCA lunch.  We had 49 people.  We hold this lunch every Friday.
The restaurant has great lunches for only $5.

Publicity

Marathon, Florida
24 42.40 081 N 05.68 W


Just a quick note.  The current issue of Lattitudes & Attitudes magazine includes a two page copy of this rainbow photo of Tarwathie.  

Brian McPhee, the photographer who took the picture, finally got some money for his excellent work.  I wasn't so lucky.  Lattitudes & Attitudes published my article on Champlain a while back, but I never got a check.  I contacted the editor and she assured me, "The check is in the mail." But I never got it.

Land Versus Water Cruising

Marathon, Florida
24 42.40 081 N 05.68 W


It's kind of a running joke.  Cruisers start with a sail boat, then they graduate to a trawler, then to an RV, then to a wheelchair.   Ha ha, lame joke.   However, we've known people who have actually made each of those transitions.


In recent years, two of our closest cruising friends, gave up their boats and bought RVs.  First it was Stephan and Lori, then Pat and Ray.  I thought it was interesting as to their insights about how cruising on land was or was not like cruising on water.   I learned several things from them.

• A boat can anchor out, or it can tie up at a marina.  Similarly, RVs can park in the wild, or they can go to an RV park.  Our friends tell us that parking in the wild is rarer in RVs than anchoring is in boats.  They spend almost all their evenings in RV parks.
  
• Because they make reservations in RV parks, and because they are less influenced by weather, RV cruisers tend to fill up their calendars well in advance.   Boaters by contrast try to resist all planning and obligations to be at a particular place on a certain date.  I think that's a very profound and important difference.
  
• The social dynamics of RV cruisers is different than boating cruisers.  One reason for that (as described to me is that in the morning, most Neighbors in the RV park will take off in all directions.  You're not likely to meet them again.  That gives less incentive to invest on making new friends spontaneously.  On boats, especially in the islands or along the ICW, you're highly likely to meet the same boats again and again, so friendships can blossom.
  
• Creature comforts are much easier to host on an RV.   Things like a reclining easy chair, or an upright refrigerator, and a TV.  The TV can be corrosive though.  It can seduce RV cruisers back into the mainstream consumer culture they were trying to escape from.
  
• Repairs are more frequent, more expensive, and harder to do yourself on an RV as compared to a boat.
  
• Like boaters, RV cruisers like to hold rendezvous with others of the same make and model, or with some other kind of affiliation.   Boat rendezvous are more local.   RV rendezvous can attract people from thousands of miles around.
  
• Some RV parks, like some marinas or harbors, attract mostly transient people who come in for a short time, then leave.  Others attract people who stay for extended periods, or who become semi-permanent residents.   In that respect, water and land cruising are alike.
  

Curiously, Stephan, Lori, Pat and Ray all gave up RV cruising and moved into fast land fixed housing after a couple of years.  Their RVs sit parked in their yards most of the time.  Their reasons for doing that were similar and family related.   Of course, unlike the sterotype, none of them are even close to wheelchair read yet.  It seems that water cruising, followed by land cruising, were chapters in their lives.   Libby and I don't plan to do that.  We hope to stay on the boat until we're too infirm to continue.

Another difference is the kinds of traffic you meet along the road. See below. :-)