Wednesday, April 17, 2013 – Cheery in Cocoa:

            I had forgotten how much I missed the middle of the night train whistles when we were back home (well, I hadn’t really forgotten as on a sleepless night or two, I was thinking how nice it would be to hear them), but it was nice to hear them again back on the boat.  I only heard a couple as we all slept like a log last night including the cat! 

The temperature is hot here, but I am not complaining, even though it was hot sleeping last night as we thought we could do without the air conditioning.   The wind, however, is whipping around again – although it doesn’t seem to be affecting the waves as the water is relatively calm.

            The first order of the day was to reprovision the boat.  We had thought about going out for breakfast, but I really like to have at least a cup of coffee before I stick my head out the door.  So…when we were packing up in Centreville on Monday, I decided to hard boil two eggs and stuff them into a plastic container along with two English muffins and a stick of butter.  In addition I purchased a carton of “mini-moos” which are little cream look-a-likes that seem to last forever, and all of that went into my suitcase along with the shirts, sweaters, and other clothing items.  I wondered if my name would be called over the loud speaker at the airport for smuggling food stuffs, panthers and other paraphernalia, but all seemed to get through ok.  We already had coffee on the boat, so we were fixed for a little breakfast.

            What was really funny was that when Bob unpacked his suitcase he found a tag from the TSA agents that indicated that his bag had been searched!!  I don’t know what they thought they would find in his bag, but they missed the one with the breakfast items!  Probably, thankfully!

            So after our little breakfast, we made a grocery list, which again looked like a small novel, picked up the rental car and drove off to Publix.  We were a little more prepared this time for the experience of two over-flowing grocery carts, and the end result at the check-out counter.  We had already rationalized that we were shopping for about six weeks and if you divide the total by six it was somewhat reasonable.  None of that takes into account, however, that every time the boat comes anywhere near land, we seem to have to find a grocery store for something.  Well, at least we didn’t pass out when the nice check-out lady rang up the total.

            We finally got the groceries back to the boat, unpacked and re-packaged the frozen food items into serving size portions, and got the rest of the food put away.  I was thinking that we had settled back into boat life pretty quickly, but I think Bob is having more trouble than me this time, because a little earlier I heard him refer to the engine room as the basement.  Basement or no, I’m still not going down there.

            I have already gotten my wildlife fix, as this afternoon a manatee was swimming lazily around in the marina.  It’s very hard to take pictures of them as all they do is stick their noses up to breathe once in a while.  I think they can stay down for as long as six minutes between breaths.  But I glued myself to the water and did my best to get a reasonable image of one.

Manatee swimming in the marina

            Missy Mouser has completely settled in.  She couldn’t wait to go outside this morning and strolled all around the boat checking everything out, and she even came up on the fly bridge with us while we had the rest of our coffee.  I tried to tell her that she probably would never be flying again, but I don’t think she grasped what I was saying.

            We have had a really busy day, and are going to be really lazy and go to the Olive Garden for dinner tonight, so I will sign off for tonight.  Tomorrow we will probably do something exciting like clean the boat!