Okay. So there are some truly great days you can spend on the water. Days when you ease into an oft-visited anchorage (like the one above), run right up close to the beach where the water's sorta aquamarine like in Bimini, drop the hook, and just listen to the silence for a few ensuing hours, if that's yer cup of Starbucks.And heck! I've been fortunate enough to enjoy a few such days over the past few months myself. Winter in North Florida, after all, is a rather wonderful time for boating. Places you normally go in the summer are often pretty empty much past November. The bugs have all gone someplace else, too. Or kicked the bucket, or done whatever bugs do when cold temperatures make 'em feel discouraged. And the air is generally bracing or, for a change of pace occasionally and briefly, downright warm.
However, as all us North Floridians know, there are those wintry times too, when whether due to rain, high winds or both, the waterways beyond our marinas start looking less than inviting and we decide to "set tight," as we say in the Sunny South.
Which is exactly what my wife and I did about two weekends ago. Certainly there wasn't any rain at the time. In fact, the sun beamed down with utter enthusiasm. But wind? Wooooooooeeeeeee! It was so dang wickedly breezy that on both Saturday and Sunday Marina Manager Steve took the flags down on the fuel dock so they wouldn't blow slap away!
Set tight?
What I mean is that we simply decided to stay onboard Betty Jane in our marina and never leave the slip--let's call it, hmmmmmmmmmm: Not Boating On A Boat In A Marina or NBOABIAM. Yeah, it's a little hard to pronounce but it's got a lot of advantages and opportunities. Here are a few cool ones:
The first boils down to sitting around in the cockpit soaking up the sun. You don't really have to have anything substantive to talk about to get the sitting-around-sun-soaking synergy to work for you. In fact, it's better to not have anything substantive to talk about at all.For example, my wife BJ (the one with the sunglasses and bluejeans all the way to the right) and her sister Judy (the one downing a glass of ice water) were gabbing about pedicures mostly at the time this photo was taken. Judy had just returned from having her toes twinkled nearby and BJ was enthusing over the workpersonship and greatly interested in comparing her feet to her sister's. "That sure is a set of toes there," I noted at one point, trying to be supportive of the familial bonding process.
Getting your hair done is another fine thing you can do while NBOABIAM.
Judy's daughter Ashley (far left) showed up not long after the above photo was taken sporting a new form of manicured headgear, which looked very nice indeed blowing in the wind.Of course, beautifications of this sort are not available in all marinas in our fair land. In fact, in some marinas I've spent time in over the years such things would have been positively wondered at. Heck, in some marinas I've spent time in over the years the amenity quotient wouldn't have stretched much farther than a couple of dogs, a bait cooler, a phone booth, and a Coke machine.
In any case, I believe Ashley enjoyed having her hair-do done at the nearby spa a lot more than a couple of wind-blown hours spent tooling around Panama City on the flybridge of the ol' Betty Jane listening to Uncle Bill's ancient, mucho-told sea stories. Thank goodness she (Ashley, not Betty Jane) is much too polite to even intimate such an ego-puncturing proposition!
One last thing you can do while NBOABIAM is eat. And there's a great little eatery at our little marina in Panama City. It's called The Butler's Pantry and it's run by Ruth Braunz.
Mostly, Ruth cooks just about everything on the premises of TBP (am I overdoing the acronyms in this little post, do you think?) in a kitchen area that's easy to see from the rest of the place in case anybody's interested. Her daughter Mallorie (that's Mallorie on the right and Ruth on the left in the photo here, by the way) helps out dutifully on weekends.
Breakfasts come fast and taste good. The chicken panini Ruth dishes up is to-die-for and the Reuben? Made with a giant, old-fashioned press of the type used to make Cuban sandwiches, it's top-tier. Buy one and the chips and drink come free!
Anyway, my most recent experience of NBOABIAM is that after you've dined at a place like TBP and maybe watched a little TV onboard (Yup, I am definitely overdoing the acronyms...big-time), sack time turns out to be wonderfully relaxed. Let's face it. There's no better place to sleep than on a boat when the weather's cool and windy, the ports are open, the water's lapping, and a bunch of halyards chime somewhere off in the distance.
The bonus with appreciating such niceties while you're still dockside is there's no anchor watch to pull, and no having to worry about dragging into the shallows or whatever. NBOABIAM? O yeah, it's great!
