Saturday May 14:  to Melbourne, FL

     Today Dan and I hashed out all our options for getting home to Maine.  We have been tossing around a lot of ideas - leaving Willie in a boat yard somewhere, trucking Willie home, cruising Willie back.  There were many pros and cons for all the possibilities:  leaving Willie behind meant we’d probably be home by the end of the month.  But it also meant traveling back to an out of state boatyard to do the work that needed doing, such as scraping and painting.  Trucking Willie would be expensive and it would be a hassle to secure everything for transport, but again, we’d get home sooner, and the boat would be in our barn for Dan to work on.  We’d been leaning toward this idea.  Both those options would also mean buying a car, which we’ll have to do anyway since we currently don’t own one, but this would not be simple to do so far from home.  The third option - cruising home - would take the longest, but was probably the least expensive.  And, we realized, it would be easiest on Tommie.  So we are cruising Willie home to Maine.  Dan can work on the boat in our barn, we’ll buy a car when we get there, and Tommie can go right from the boat to house with minimal stress on her.

    As we got underway from Fort Pierce, Dan got in touch with our friends from Palm Bay to let them know we were back in the US and would be in their area today.  Dave and Dianne were in their summer home in Indiana, but copied Ed and Joyce on his reply and they immediately invited us to their home for dinner and hot showers.  As emails sped back and forth, their hospitality extended to offering us a ride to get groceries or do other errands as well as finding us a place to anchor and a safe place to land and leave our dinghy.

     This area, with its proximity to Cape Canaveral and things aeronautical and space related, is home to satellite engineering plants and think tanks.  I think we mentioned a Thursday night get-together of great minds at local bar Rooneys, which we have been privileged to be part of on occasion, including last December when we passed through this area on our way down the coast.  Ed and Joyce are part of that crowd, as are Jack and Jackie, who are the caretakers for a local yacht club where we were welcomed to land our dinghy and make use of their facilities.  All four of them were there to greet us as we came ashore with our various bags and jugs, as was Jackson, Jack & Jackie’s little Jack Russell terrier.  They all have been keeping up to date on our adventures; Ed fills them in on our blog updates when they meet for their weekly Thursday night at Rooney’s.  We almost felt like celebrities.

     Joyce and I grocery-shopped and went back to her place while Ed and Dan ran around town for propane and other necessities.  She effortlessly prepared a fantastic roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner for us while Dan and I had the luxury of a real shower and did a load of laundry.  (I’ve been hand-washing most of our things, but those king-sized sheets in the v-berth are too big to hand-wash and hand-wring, and we can’t really hang them on the lifeline to dry.)

     Ed and Joyce had been to the Bahamas in the early years of their marriage, and have many years of cruising under their belts.  They offered us a lot of tips and advice as we prepared for our trip and we were all eager to swap stories.  We had a wonderful evening with them.  

no photos today, sorry