Back on the Water

After nearly three months with no blog additions, I'm back at it. We spent the summer away from the boat up north engaged in lots of great adventures with family and friends. These included among a number of others: camping in the White Mountains of NH, camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah National Park, visiting with children and grandchildren as well as visiting sisters and their families.

Blue Ridge Mountains from Skyline Drive

But now we're back home on Carpe Diem in Vero Beach, Florida (for those who've forgotten where we left the boat). This brings to mind an interesting phenomenon we've experienced as we move about. Most people know that when they are home, they are also in a specific geographic location. Not so with us. Hence we have this problem occasionally. We sleep in our own bed at night, but we wake up in the morning with the familiar surroundings inside the boat, but it takes a minute or two to remember where home is at that moment. Usually we can remind ourselves by knowing what month it is and then determining where we should be during that month. Not so this year. Here it is September, so we should be up in Virginia or even further north. We've never been at home in Florida in September, so we can't even use the date. This helps to keep our life interesting.

The view of the Vero mooring field from our cockpit

All things haven't changed this year, however. Since it's September, we are doing the usual annual cleaning and fix-up chores. These normally include waxing the hull, checking each of the sails for tears or failed seams and taking care of the boats bottom paint. We also have this year, as most years, a variety of fix-it chores to address before we leave Vero. This year, however, we're not repainting. Since many cruisers manage to do this biannually or even less frequently, we're going to give the biannual schedule a try this time around. We will have a diver do a thorough cleaning of the bottom, scraping off the barnacles and algae that have accumulated over the summer.

Of course we're not in a hurry to leave the protection of this marina, since we're still in active hurricane season. With Sandra's sister Paula coming for a visit in early October, we'll stay a bit beyond her visit before heading out.

In the meantime, we aren't spending all our time working on the boat. We're also enjoying our current “home” location. The beach is a mile away and the ocean water temperature is really nice and warm. We've been swimming several times and plan to continue enjoying that option as well as evening walks on the beach which is never crowded.

The views of water and clouds are spectacular on our beach walks.

My sister Mary Jo is in West Palm Beach, so we've already been down to visit her and her family.

The rocket that carried the shuttle

Additionally, we drove up to Cape Kennedy Space Center for a tour. We hadn't been there since our girls we quite young, so we could remember little of that visit and knew that much more would be displayed now perhaps 35 years later. We were correct on that assumption. What a spectacular visit. We heard lots of what has been happening here over the past decades and learned that NASA is beginning to reorganize the station for the next phase – that of moving from serving as a launch pad only for NASA scientific explorations to that of providing similar services for commercial and private entities. Already SpaceX has launched a vehicle from here to bring supplies to the International Space Station. No people on board yet, but that is bound to happen as well. Boeing also has facilities at the Kennedy Space Center. It sounds as though other corporations as well will be getting actively involved in space travel.

Taken by the Hubble telescope - Orion will never seem quite the same.

We learned lots about the space station and the Hubble telescope and saw photos of the far corners of our known universe, thanks to Hubble – really spectacular!

I know that we're not getting along with Russia these days as much as we'd like on many fronts. However, when it comes to space, we seem to be working pretty well together. The space station residents have been getting shuttled up and back by the Russians, since our shuttle operation is on hold, waiting for the new vehicle that I believe Lockheed Martin is building. The crews have been a mixture of US, Russian, Japanese and European astronauts with perhaps representatives from other places as well. It's great that we can work together on such projects. Too bad we can't extend that cooperation to all aspects of our life here on this small planet.