First day out…

We left Gasparilla marina early Monday morning. We waved goodbye to some new friends that we had made and we were on our way. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had a captain got with us on the first day of our trip. Mark is from New Zealand and now makes his living diving to clean boat bottoms, captaining and other “stuff”.  With his help, we were able to make the first day of our trip a great experience with much less anxiety than we would have had, if we had tried to do it alone. The Franklin Lock was not very difficult to lock through and we did fine.

We discovered that going through a lock was not all that difficult. Here we are starting through. Of course,on this lock, Mark was still with us to drive the boat. From then on in, Steve had to get the boat in place, put the engines in neutral and then hold the rope so that our boat didn’t swing away from the wall.

We ended the day at Rialto Marina and thank goodness, Mark was there to dock the boat.  Docking the boat at that marina was NOT for the faint of heart so thank goodness we had Mark there to put the boat in for us.

Rialto Marina was beautiful and a great place to spend the night. Didn’t Misty look nice in this setting?

Well, since that was on Monday and this is Thursday, there is obviously more to write about. However, I am finding two things. By the end of the day on the water, I am VERY tired. The other thing is that wifi has really been hard to get so it is more difficult to get post done. I really miss my home computer and wifi setting and before we take this boat out next year, we will be finding the best way to have a more reliable setup.

More tomorrow…IF I have a connection (sigh)…