11 April 2015

Susan was super motivated to do laundry on Friday when we got here. At $1.50 to wash and the same price to dry it’s some of the lowest rates we’ve seen for machines. I dumped a load in Saturday to be ahead of the curve.

One thing about this trip is the clothing requirements for me has been shorts or long pants and t-shirts. I brought 14 (two weeks) and have purchased another 14 so I could go for about a month. Looking back I should have brought pants / shorts and three shirts and bought as I went along.

While laundry suds away, I filled water tanks and did a quick spray down of the boat. On yesterday’s run with the Captain of Haley’s Comet I had gotten some great metal polish that I used to get the rust marks off the anchor. Today I did the brightwork (aka those silver railings) on the forward part of the boat. I can do the bimini top and the upper helm station the next time we travel.

We did a quick run to the bank. While electronic paying is all well and good, we had run out of small bills to use as dock hand tips. We tip for good service and in lots of cases the action of the tip has lead to some secret local info that has saved us more than the tip or dinner at a place that only the locals have information about. I’ve had discussions about tipping with other Loopers, some are against it (it’s their job to help you dock) to ones that have had our experience that tipping often gets repaid back in other ways.

Today (11 April) is International Table Top Game day. Back when I was younger, family game night was something that we did for entertainment. It was a table game or cards that was played. Life, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, Clue, etc. With the advent of electronic games that’s gone away. Mike and I’ve played multi-player games on the computer, but that’s because we had a LAN in the house.

(Insert story about a family that plays Monopoly on their tablets connected to the same game. Like sitting around the table, but not really).

Three years ago, Wil Wheaton (Star Trek, Big Bang Theory) and a group of friends started International Table Top Game Day to get people to play games face to face with real people. It’s really exploded in size and there were 1000′s of locations that held events. One was in Jacksonville, near Mike’s house. Since we had rented a car (Yay Enterprise three day weekend rental for $20 a day including taxes) it was easy to do.

I got to Games and Stuff to find the place was packed. They had cake, cookies and a slew of games to try out. Mike had gotten us table space and we played Takenoko a board game that has you building bamboo gardens for the Imperial Chinese Emperors Panda Bears. We had played this game before at Christmas and again when Mike came down to Tavernier. It’s pretty simple and the game lasts about 20-25 minutes so it goes quickly. I did pretty well (loosing to Mike by just a few points is doing very well).

The people next to us asked if we wanted to play “Castle Panic”. We said sure and moved over. The game is a “tower defense game” in which monsters (orc, trolls, etc) come out of the forest to attack your castle. It’s interesting since the players are playing against the game, not against each other. So it helps to cooperate with the other players. On the other hand the winner is the person that kills the most monsters, so there is sometimes a little bit of “not doing that for the team” that goes on. It was fun and we played two rounds.

During the game there was a pair of raffles run by the store and I won a card game. We were in the process of setting it up when we got asked to play “Sails of Glory”. It’s a battle game between the French and the English. Each person has a sailing ship to Captain. I manned the Terpischore and we sailed into battle. It’s like playing “little green army men”, except you are on a boat with more detailed rules (and a lack of giant dirt clods being thrown by your brother).

It was fun to play. Because there were boat models we were moving around on “the ocean” (blue cloth from JoAnn’s) between two islands (local hobby model train store mountains) the guy that was running the game also had white cotton to use as smoke to signify when we had fired our cannons. Mike and I quickly sank the smaller of the two French vessels. In an astounding move 20 mins later Mike grounded his vessel stopping it, causing the second French vessel that was turning next to him to become stern placed to Mike’s ship, and it was raking shot time! Since I was still floating it was determined that I could pull Mike off from being grounded, and we won the game.

Having defeated the French we went back to “Dead Man’s Draw” card game. We figured out the rules and played two rounds. It goes very quickly and is a good two person game so it will be fun to play with Susan on the boat.

We had dinner and I headed back to the Quo Vadimus. Susan reported that it had rained most of the day, and it was pouring when I got back to the dock. Weather for the upcoming week is rain every afternoon, so we will plan on doing early morning sails and be in port by 2 PM.