Days 201 - 208

The Club @ Treasure Island - Clearwater FL

• Start 10:00 AM
• End 12:30 PM
• Underway 2:30 Hours
• Distance 20 Miles
• Total Miles on Trip 4199
• Av Speed 8.2 knots
• Weather Mostly Sunny , 75 Degrees, Wind 6 Knts NE

I cannot remember the last time we planned for such a "late" departure. Ilene had a conference call from 9-10am, so rather than worrying if we would have cell coverage as we travelled we waited until she was done. With Clearwater only being 20 miles away, there was no hurry to leave. This will be our last travel day for a month.

We decided to stay in Clearwater for a month for a couple of reason. One, we have several choices for airports to fly back to New Jersey for Christmas. Two is they have two municipal marinas that are reasonably priced. Three Mark (Kay Dee) was able to recommend a diver that could work on my props. (I have been having a slight vibration, that needs to be fixed). And finally we will be close to Mark & Karen (Kay Dee) and Amy & Rommel (Happiness Is)!

We were a little disappointed to find the park that surrounds the marina is gone; it is under construction until 2023. They are building a new better park. The biggest effect it has on us, is we have close to a ½ mile walk just to get out of the marina and we get to listen to construction equipment all day long. The location is still pretty good.

The first thing we did was to go pick up Matt's sister's car. It was nice to have a vehicle that we did not have to return in 2 hours. We got a lot of little errands completed.

I also took advantage of having Matt & Ilene with us to get some boat maintenance done. The raw water pump on the port motor was due to be serviced. (It was the one that failed and was serviced in Lake St Clair) It is much easier to service it proactively than to wait until it fails. This time we were able to do it with only 4 curse words (Two directed at Matt when he laughed at me) instead of the 42 the last time I did it.

We also had a diver (Troy) come out to remove the props for service. It turned out that the props did not need to be serviced, just reset on the shaft. Troy also found that both cutlass bearings needed to be replaced. (Cutlass Bearings hold the propeller shaft in place) Troy has a partner that is able to do this in the water, it will take two days but it will be much easier on us than trying to have the boat hauled out of the water.

Clearwater Beach is a short ride over the causeway from the marina we are staying at, while it might have been nice to spend the month there, I think it would not have been healthy for either our livers or wallets. Clearwater beach is a very typical shore town, with every restaurant, bar and store you could imagine. The four of us did go out to dinner and a bar promising live music. Of course the minute we walked in, the band went on dinner break, and when we left 40 minutes later they were still on break.

On Friday we had our last hurrah with Matt & Ilene. We drove to Crystal River to swim with the manatees. It was great time. Captian Ryan did and excellent job of finding manatees and our guide Brook kept leading us right to them. Swimming with theeese gental giants is somethign everyone should experince.

Sadly Matt & Ilene have to return home on Saturday. It was great having company for the last two weeks.

Angel's and my next big adventure will be flying home for Christmas. Hopefully the flights will go smoothly.

Normally I update the blog after each stop. That would mean this update would not have come out until after January 15th. Because we are going to be in Clearwater for a month, I will probably (key work probably haha) update the blog once a week.