It Takes Four to Tango

Saturday February 16, 2013

(Photo courtesy of Four 2 Tango)

I have been racking my brain trying to remember what we did yesterday, but I can’t come up with anything.  My guess is that we ran more errands, nothing interesting happened, and that’s why I can’t remember it.  The only thing I do remember is that I made a kick-ass chicken stir-fry for dinner.  It was soooo good.  The other thing I remember, is that while taking a quick bathroom break while the rice was cooking, I met a really nice family out in the yard, on the way back to their boat.  We started chatting, and it turns out, they knew who we were!  What?!  Or I should say, they knew of our story and how we ended up in St. Augustine.  They even told me, “We specifically avoided the St. Augustine Inlet and went down the ICW instead because of what happened to you”.  How interesting that our fate could have the impact to change other cruisers plans.  In any sense though, we all laughed at what a small world it is and decided to all get together the next night over dinner and discuss our cruising disasters.

Before we could make it out for dinner though, we had to spend the day doing…more boat projects.  And for me that meant…more sewing.  Ugh, the dreaded sewing.  Yu still hadn’t come back to get her machine yet, I think she was enjoying her time away from it as much as I was starting to dislike having it around (for the sole purpose that I couldn’t get out of my work now, the machine still rocks), so I had to tackle the job of the pucker I had put into the bimini while trying to fix a not even noticeable ‘taught-ness’ on the sides.  The good news was that since it was the weekend I had the shed to myself with all the space necessary to work, but on a downside, there was a huge dip in temperature so it was freezing out along with 20-25 knot winds blowing all around.  Since there was no one in the yard and no one to impress, although, who am I really trying to impress anyway?, I stuck it out in my sweatpants and bundled up in long underwear and winter hat.

Trying to set my materials down on the picnic table by the vending machines, the wind was so strong that it kept trying to pick the bimini up and turn it into a sail.  We already have enough of those on board, so I wanted to stick to the project of making it pretty and giving us shade.  Moving to another picnic table around the corner I spread the cloth down but still had a nice breeze cutting around and getting in my way once in awhile.  Getting to work, I didn’t follow the rule of three and honestly thought it would be a 30-45 minute job. I mean, I just had to rip out a seam about 8 inches on each end, let the fabric out a half inch, and stitch it back up.  Nuh uh.  This caused a ripple in the fabric that I didn’t find until it was already stitched.  So back to seam ripping it was.  Except this time I had to take out the whole length.  I don’t know why it wasn’t working out, but try as I might, I could not get rid of the ripple and was going to have a small bunch of fabric somewhere.  Finally I decided that I’d put it close to the center where the solar panel would hide it and called it good.  I don’t know why I didn’t just leave it as it was the first day.  To me, it had looked perfect.  Close to 4 hours of work later I was finally finished, and also famished.

Ready to feed that appetite, we went to visit our new friends.   At 7:00, we boarded Tango, a 35 ft Tobago Catamaran owned and operated by Andy and Robyn.  Traveling with them are their two daughters, Madi and Peyton, who greeted us at the salon table as we sat down.  Also at the table was an awesome spread of homemade salsa and guacamole.  Cracking a beer I began to dig right in.  Let it be know that there are always manners among cruisers, but when it comes to food, it’s a free for all. So while sitting there and eating some amazing and fresh salsa with a few tortilla chips, we began on the conversation of cruising and our trips thus far.  Not before we could be gifted an adorably cute vase that Madi had made for us earlier that day, and even collected flowers from the field across the street to fill it.  Cruisers, I have to tell you, are some amazing people.  While learning more about each other, we found that Andy and Robyn had left in October from the Chesapeake.  Turns out they were practically on our tails, having left just after Hurricane Sandy.

We joked about our troubles so far, and how we both swear that there was a bad weather cloud that followed us all the way down the east coast.  I don’t know how many times each of our boats had heard, “It’s unusually cold right now, I swear, it’s never like this around this time of year.  It was so nice just before you got here.”.  We both agreed that hearing that gets old very quick.  And then it was on to the topic of groundings.  They already knew all about ours, so there wasn’t any new news there, but they did have their own to tell back from when they were in North Carolina.  It was something where they eventually got off by themselves, but the kicker is when they hailed they boat they just moved out of the way for to say they were grounded, all this boat came back with was “Bummer”, and then sped off.  But I’m sure we’re all learning so far as we get further into our adventures, is when issues like this happen, even if they piss you off at the time, they’ll always make for great stories later.  Cause what fun is it getting together with other cruisers to swap stories if you’ve only had smooth sailing?

Andy and Banyan.