Into the fray…

And I’m back!  Sorry for the extended radio silence, but this blog is about living aboard and I’ve been at home on land for the past three months.

We’re heading back to Indigo Lady sometime in the next two weeks.  If you recall, she is parked at a marina in Fort Pierce, Florida. Yup, we’re heading toward COVID territory.

It may sound a bit crazy, but Fort Pierce is in St. Lucie County which has the third lowest infection rate in Florida (just over 3000 cumulative) and death rates on par with NH. We are taking steps to be as safe as possible. We are driving down over two days with only one night in a hotel for which we’re bringing our own bedding and a large container of disinfectant wipes. We have two N95 masks, a box of disposables and several fabric ones. We are self sufficient on board Lady with our own hose to run fresh water from the dock to our tanks, our own showers, our own electricity (though sadly no AC), and our own washing machine. Because we’re driving we are buying all our nonperishable provisions up here, so we’ll only have to make one quick trip to a Florida market for fresh and frozen foods. 

Why are we going down in the midst of a pandemic? Primarily, our lithium iron phosphate batteries need to be replaced. (That’s a story in itself which I will tell in a future blog post.) They are en route from Europe as I type and should arrive in Miami at the end of this coming week. From there it will take “up to seven days,” we’ve been told, to reach the marina in Fort Pierce. It will take Dave 1-2 days to get them installed. While we await their arrival we will tend to other boat projects. Our large fresh water tank needs to be extricated and brought somewhere to be welded (one thing Dave can’t do on board). One of our hot water tanks needs some parts replaced, which Dave already has in hand. Our cross-ship cable needs a replacement connector, also already in hand. We also need to replace our four 6V batteries. I can’t actually do any of this work, but I will hand Dave tools when he needs them. I also have bug screens to finish making for 6 hatches and 8 portholes, and I will do the grocery shopping.

We figure we need two round trips to the welder, one round trip to Costco for the 6V batteries, and one round-trip to the grocery store. Other than that, we’ll stay onboard other than an occasional walk and maybe takeout from a local restaurant once or twice.

How long will we be down there? That depends on our throttle. Did I mention that also needed repairs? In early May we shipped it to the one guy in the US who does work here for the Finnish company. He couldn’t fix it and sent it to Finland for repair almost two weeks ago. We’re still waiting to find out when they will get it back to us. If it arrives before we’re done all the other boat work we will install it, drop lines, and head to the Floriday Keys for the remainder of August (or until we get chased out by a hurricane). We will have enough provisions on board so that we won’t need to go ashore other than maybe once or twice to offload garbage, although if we’re careful we may not even need to do that. We plan on exploring several of the diving/snorkeling sights in the near to mid Keys, sitting at anchor or on a mooring ball several nights at each. 

Around September 1st we’ll start the return trip to the Fort Pierce marina. Once there we’ll close up Lady again and drive home to return in January when we will, if we’re fortunate, continue our trek to the Caribbean.

Author: Indigo Lady

I am a retired educator married to a retired chemist/engineer/educator. We will be living aboard our solar electric catamaran for as long as possible. View all posts by Indigo Lady