8 April 2015

Another dawn departure, we have a short day today but we’ve been doing better traveling in the morning when it’s cooler.

I put the boat up on plane to help drain the forward area into the mid-bilge. I did it too fast and was rewarded with water in the hallway that Susan sopped up. Sigh.

We are starting to see the same sets of boats during the day. We passed Chumba, a sail boat for the third time this week. While it takes us about 4.5 hours to go the 30 miles, it’s an all day sail for them.

We docked at Melbourne about 11AM, only 27 miles today. We did more white vinegar in the bilges. We played some with Susan’s camera to see how it shoots video. It does pretty well, but if we decide to shoot some real ones we’ll need a tripod.

I changed out the starboard fuel filter. I’m getting much better distance out of them last run was about 150 gallons, well up from the under 75 I have been getting. We are getting bounced more by wakes here, so I’m thinking that the bottom is getting stirred up. The last fuel load was Valtec, it’s got a cleaner in it that will help with the particles.

We caught a taxi to a brew pub and we found that taxi services in Melbourne are about what they are in NYC. Our 4 mile taxi ride was $17. Yikes!

The Intracoastal Brewery was great! They have 10 different beers on tap that they make and guest taps from other Florida breweries. We got the flight of 11 to try. There were lots of very good ones, it was hard to pick our favorites out.

Like the Soo Brewing Company (Sault Ste Marie) they have a huge stack of table games. We played “Cards Against Humanity” a game that matches well with our snarky senses of humor.

We ordered food from the local “Philly Place”. We got cheese steaks that tasted like home. We also got “pig wings” Susan texted Dave and he said they were rib ends. They scrape the meat up some and then deep fry them. They have the chance to become our new snack food.

The karma of the day was tarnished a little by the 40 min wait for the Yellow Cab (really, do you have only one cab working at dinner time? And the $20 ride home. It would have been cheaper to take the Quo Vadimus at those rates.

Boat smelled better tonight, so we are getting in front of this problem!