West Palm Beach

Hello y’all and greetings from West Palm Beach!  It’s hard to believe it’s already December 6 - hope everyone up north is staying warm and getting in the holiday spirit.  Only 16 more days until our kiddos arrive for Christmas (not that I’m counting or anything).  It feels awfully good to not be a part of all the pre-holiday mayhem, but I sure miss baking Christmas cookies and making chocolate covered pretzels like we have every year for decades.

Since our last post, we stayed for several days anchored in a charming place called Manatee Pocket (love that name!) near the city of Port Salerno.  It is a busy little harbor with plenty of places for us to explore; parks, restaurants, and stores.  A sailfish tournament was going on all weekend, so we saw all the huge sport fishing boats coming and going from the marinas close by.  The town hosted a Christmas Boat Parade, and we had inadvertently anchored in a primo spot for viewing from our fly bridge while we cranked up the holiday tunes (another one of my favorite parts of the season).

I hadn’t mentioned it before, but Mark had become dissatisfied with the amount of dinghy propulsion power we had using our electric trolling motor - range was good but thrust was apparently inadequate for his tastes (must go faster……).  He had periodically been searching Craigslist ads in each city we visited, with no luck until Cocoa.  As luck would have it, he found just what he was looking for, and the seller lived only 3 houses down the street from Uncle Jack - it was just meant to be.

Of course, Manatee Pocket was the perfect place to try out our enhanced dinghy with the new (to us) Honda 4-Stroke 5 HP outboard motor, so we confidently took a long dinghy ride to a little park on the other end of the cove on a beautiful, sunny afternoon.  Just prior to tying up at the park, Mark noted a change in engine tone and was initially puzzled by what had caused it.  As it turns out, the engine oil drain plug had apparently shimmied loose, and we had unknowingly been christening Manatee Pocket with freshly changed oil on our travels.  It was quite a long and slow row back, and led us to the secondary challenge of figuring out how to replace the relatively inexpensive (but incredibly valuable to us) bolt - more on that later.

Also, the engine valve cover leak onboard Quality Time has continued unabated despite the new gasket installation, to Mark’s consternation.  Apparently the newly replaced gasket had not remained perfectly in place during the installation process, resulting in small gaps through which oil could escape.  A plan was developed involving gasket adhesive (as Uncle Jack had wisely recommended previously), which would also be a challenge to procure (for less resourceful and determined souls).

We arrived in West Palm Beach yesterday (Monday), and needless to say, it is beautiful down here.  We scored a perfect anchorage at the heart of downtown by the city docks, so all the excitement is just a short dinghy ride away.  Apparently, before I awoke this morning, Mark had taken the dinghy to the pier (with bike on board) and had then pedaled himself to an auto parts store in town to buy the needed gasket adhesive.  A new oil drain plug for the outboard motor is also scheduled to be delivered to a nearby UPS store (we are very big Amazon Prime fans) later today.  Another bike ride to pick it up, and both problems should hopefully be solved.  Here’s hoping!

And we have to give a shout out to the city of West Palm Beach for having the most amazing Christmas light display we have ever seen.  There is a huge sand sculpture of a beautifully detailed Christmas tree (named, of course, Sandi) that took 600 tons of sand to create.  The downtown park area has been transformed into a festive wonderland, with holiday music and synchronized lighting that is just unbelievable.  What a spectacle!!!!!  And it feels a lot more like Christmas to us now : )

Well friends, we will be continuing southward tomorrow, likely stopping in Fort Lauderdale or Miami before long.  We’ll chat with y’all from there - thanks for sticking with us!