Happy belated New Year! Hope everyone’s holidays were fantastic!
Blue Turtle and crew had a short post-Christmas cruise like always, however, this year it was plagued with the flu/cold/crud. Our original cruising plan was to leave Fort Myers Beach the day after Christmas and head north to Cayo Costa and a new destination we’ve been wanting to visit, Don Pedro Island. We’d heard reports that red tide was pretty bad in the area and so decided that we would delay and day and head south to Keewaydin Island. As usual, Keeywaydin Island was beautiful but unfortunately, Randy and I weren’t very active since we were sick. I guess if you have to be sick somewhere, Keeywaydin is a great spot since since we had beautiful sunset views of the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t think we ever left the boat and went to shore but at least we had gorgeous views which is way better than being at the dock.
Cruising the Gulf of Mexico our way to Keeywaydin
Beautiful and busy Keeywaydin
Sun setting over Keeywaydin Island
Randy and Corey chill on the bridge in the late afternoon
Corey on the other hand, lucked out. He didn’t catch what we had AND a fellow friend from the wake board cable park where he goes came by Blue Turtle 3 days in a row and picked him up in his wake board boat to take him out. Talk about lucky! He got to escape the sneezing and hacking on Blue Turtle and got to wake board behind a professional boat. At least one of us had a great time!
Corey got picked up daily to go go wake boarding … lucky kid!
On about our third day at Keeywaydin our generator wouldn’t start. Randy (while sick) spent almost 2 days in the engine room trying to get the starter to work. Several YouTube videos and disassemblies later, he declared the starter fried. Since we only needed the generator to charge batteries (no AC needed in the winter!) we decided to stay a couple more days and run the main engine to charge things up. While this did work for us there were a couple drawbacks like the hot water heater wouldn’t work and I couldn’t run the microwave or cooktop. This meant cold showers (did I mention it was cold that week?) and cold food (unless I grilled in the 15 knot wind) for two days. After two days of “glamping” I was ready to head home for a hot meal and warm shower. Needless to say we now have a brand new starter for the generator waiting to be installed and we are looking forward to the next cruising trip where we will be a little more energetic.
Randy gets comfy in the engine room with some YouTube tutorials
Our disassembled generator starter
Sun melting over the Gulf of Mexico … better view than the dock!
So, what’s in the plans for 2018?
For starters, I’m anxiously awaiting the March 2018 issue of PassageMaker magazine in which my very first published article (and photos) will appear. I wrote a piece about cruising to the Dry Tortugas and can’t wait to see the finished article in REAL. LIVE. PRINT!
Also, we’ve been invited again to do a cruising seminar for TrawlerFest in Stuart, FL in March. We’ll be giving our “Cruising to the Dry Tortugas” presentation and I will be sitting on a panel of women cruisers answering questions of all kinds for the Admiral’s Roundtable session. I’ll be posting more info on this very soon.
Finally, this May we will be celebrate 6 (SIX!) years living aboard Blue Turtle. I can’t believe it and I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging here about it that long. I’d like to invite you, our readers, to send in any questions you may have about living aboard and this lifestyle or any questions about cruising. We receive a lot of blog comments and messages from the website and I’ve done the best I can to answer each one. I’ve realized that some of the same questions get asked more frequently and that it might be helpful to feature them on the blog with lengthier answers so that it may help other readers out there as well. So, hit us up on our contact form and ask away!
We’re looking forward to another amazing year aboard Blue Turtle and are so happy to have you along for the ride!
The post Another New Year for Blue Turtle and crew appeared first on Blue Turtle Trawler.
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