Saturday, April 9, 2016

Saturday in Naples

Naples has the prettiest beach I have ever seen. It has pale sand and pale, pale water, the color of aqua, but paler with lights in it. Bright white crests of waves, yet perfectly clear like drinking water. It is just beautiful. 
The beach in Naples
Brian at the beach
Bob and Cece Clarke are here next to us on their catamaran, Second Wind. They’ve been cruising in the Keys and the Gulf for a few months. 

Bob and Cece of Second Wind
I’m having a little trouble reentering boat life. It’s Saturday and it’s been a week since we left, but it doesn’t feel like a vacation yet. We haven’t gone very far, we’ve stayed in the marina most of the time, we’ve done paperwork, and now it’s the weekend and it's getting crowded. We forgot that we would need a "shake-down” period, but Pearl has certainly reminded us. The alternator problem turned out to be a simple blown fuse hidden inside a box that was hidden inside another box in the engine room below. The guys here only made it worse, and it took Brian all day Thursday to find the fuse and replace it. They did not charge us for the “repair” thank goodness. 

We walked to a hardware store to buy a volt-reader. We also walked to a nearby walk-in clinic to get some antibiotics for Brian’s sore throat.

On Friday the propane ran out. When I started to boil water to start supper, the propane was gone - not just from one tank, but from both, because we had forgotten that we had not refilled them before storing the boat for the winter. We cooked on Bob and Cece’s boat, but first I dropped the asparagus into the marina, since for some reason I am especially clumsy right now along with everything else

Saturday we found a great farmer’s market, got the propane tanks refilled, and took a taxi to a mall to look at new IPads. Brian’s is four years old and giving him trouble. We learne
d, interestingly, that there’s a chip in the IPad and if you are having trouble connecting to your service, you can pop it out, pop it back in, and the thing (hopefully) will come back on.  So far it has.

All these things can be fixed, and thank goodness they are all happening now in a town rather than at an anchorage.

One of many banyon trees.
The tabebuia trees were in bloom,
filled with little yellow trumpet-shaped flowers.
Another banyon - can you see the house on the right?
It really is that BIG!
Palms
Private jets, in and out of Naples.

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