Getting Settled in Marathon

 We arrived in Marathon/Boot Key Harbor on Monday, January 24th. We had a difficult time finding a place to anchor, but it seems that SHIFT was ready to stop and we had a good first night. 

The second day, we were up early to head over to the marina to get checked in, pay our fees for shore services and get our name on the list for a mooring ball. When we checked, we were #20 on the list for a ball. We talked to our neighbor Bob and Sheila on "Sails Call", they were #9. They had been in the anchorage for 2 weeks. It looks like we are going to be here a while. 

We went back to the boat and looked at our options. My biggest concern was that we had a big blow coming in on Friday, so I wanted to get situated to weather that. We moved a grand total of about 100 yards, but that put us much further from the boats around us. I had been paying attention to each one and how they swing. The problem is that they are all on different amounts of rode causing their swing patterns to be different. 

The first week, we focused on domestic chores. Kim did laundry, I borrowed a loaner bike from the marina and made a grocery run for milk and other fresh foods. We made daily trips to shore for showers and fill water jugs to fill the tank in the boat. I also put out a second anchor to give us some additional holding for the strong north wind that was coming.

This is what it looks like in 10 knots of wind.

This is what the harbor looks like in 20 to 30 knots of wind. Still not bad wave action with the protection of the harbor.

 The storm came as forecast. We had 20 to 30 knots of wind out of the north. It also got much cooler. We even set a low temperature record of 46 degrees on Saturday night. That beat the previous record of 49 degrees. We stayed on the boat for two days and rode it out.  Riding out storms at anchor is not my favorite part of this lifestyle, but this one was not too bad. We did have one boat in the anchorage drag anchor. It almost hit our friends on "Sails Call". It settled into the shallows behind us and ran aground. 

After the storm the weather returned to more settled weather and we started to get into life in Boot Key harbor. They have a morning net on the VHF radio. All tune into channel 80 and the leader walks through announcements and other things going on. 

Kim played dominos one afternoon while I worked on this blog. We both played pickleball on Tuesday, which I really enjoyed. There is no shortage of things to do. 

This is the scene at Pickleball. I am on the second court over. We had about 40 people there on this day. 

We have big plans for the boat while we are here. Although the wind has been strong, which means our wind turbine keeps the batteries fully charged, we need to do an upgrade to our electrical systems if we are going to live unplugged for extended periods of time. I will lay out our plans jin my next entry.