Vero Beach – 1 mile by dinghy, 5 kilometres walked
Today was both sluggish and productive. At 8am I met a local guy who had used dive equipment for sale and picked up two weight belts, 12 pounds of weight, and an XL shorty wetsuit which fit me perfectly. The weight belts are for two things – keeping myself underwater when I scrape the marine growth bottom of the boat (which I will start doing in the Bahamas once the water clears up) and for the same buoyancy purpose when spearfishing. In talking to boaters we’ve recently realized that we might be able to catch a lot of our food in the Bahamas – primarily lobster, hogfish, conch, snapper, and lionfish. This could help solve one of our problems, being the astronomical prices of food in that country. The other way we are addressing that was the focus of one of our boat projects today – converting half of our large top loading fridge into freezer space with the installation of an insulating panel. If that performs as expected we will be able to load up with a lot more frozen items in Florida before we leave, which should get us through the first month or so in the islands.
Saturday was the weekly Vero Beach farmers market near the main public beach, and after a slow morning on the boat we happened to reach the marina at the same time as the free public bus so scored ourselves a ride there. It was a vibrant affair with several produce vendors and many others selling food to go and specialty products like honey, guacamole, pies, baking, and crafts. Ana paid five bucks for a single croissant at a French bakery vendor and deemed it as good as the ones we enjoyed in France last year. I picked up a chili cheese dog, thick with melted American cheese and it was heavenly. We also found all the vegetables we needed, and after paying the vendor for our bag of greens, she said, “Free for you – one lime and one cucumber. Go get it!” It was sort of like a customer loyalty program, but you didn’t need to sign up for a card or membership; instant rewards instead. If we had spent another ten bucks I bet that would have earned us a free eggplant. One perplexing discovery has been the crazy high prices of oranges and grapefruit here. We’ve read that the area surrounding Vero Beach produces 70% of Florida’s grapefruit crop, yet grapefruit here are just as expensive than all the more northern places we’ve visited – two bucks each, and oranges are nearly a dollar apiece. Then again, we don’t get any deals on maple syrup in Canada.
After securing the bag of nutrition we abandoned our initial plan of heading back into the main commercial area today to provision. We also learned that Vero’s annual Christmas parade was happening today and would be shutting down all the busses and we weren’t up for walking another twelve kilometres round trip, so instead we walked back to the marina and returned to the boat. I was happy when Ana expressed zero interest in the parade as the whole idea of Christmas in sunny Florida just doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s no visions of sugar plums dancing in anybody’s heads here – just sugar doughnuts. No chestnuts roasting on open fires – the only open fires I’ve heard of are the occasional motorboat blowing up, and nobody’s sitting around roasting anything on those. As for the reindeer, nope – all shot and turned into jerky. Blankets of fluffy white snow? No siree Bob, just blankets of plasticky orange processed cheese on my chili dog.
Back at the boat, everything was calm and beautiful until it wasn’t. One minute I was sitting in the cockpit enjoying a triple-decker BLT, interrupted only by the sighting of another manatee, and the next thing I know our boat had exploded with tools and mess everywhere. A simple defrosting of our main fridge turned into the aforementioned fridge modification project. I had also started with installing snaps and straps on the panels of our cockpit enclosure so that we could easily roll them up instead of having to remove them all the time. This would provide better air circulation for the heat in Bahamas, but also much better visibility when underway. The fridge modification project kicked off in the middle of my strapping and the circular sawing of white Starboard layered everything in the cockpit with a fine coating of polyethylene dust creating a formidable mess of microscopic white quills sticking into everything. We finished the fridge project just as we lost daylight so I’d have to return to strap the final two panels tomorrow. The next hour was spent cleaning and in doing so, Ana noticed a chip out of the wood trim near the sink. Here comes the sandpaper and teak oil and she went to town sanding down wood and toweling in oil throughout the boat as I sat half awake and half asleep trying to catch up on a single episode of a series we’re trying to watch. This was my third attempt and just as fruitless as the last two so I went to bed and fell asleep with hallucinogenic teak oil vapours leeching into my nose, producing the strangest of dreams.
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