Figuring out life on the hook

Being newbies to this cruising life, every day is a learning experience. 

We’re currently anchored in English Navy Cove near Pensacola.  This has proven to be not only a beautiful but cruiser friendly anchorage as Shoreline Park has a boat launch where we can tie up our dinghy.

Due to the issue with the leaking window, we had quite a bit of damp/dirty laundry.   Way more than we wanted to hand wash aboard.  We were able to dinghy across the bay to a day use dock and, after only walking a little over a city block with our backpacks full of dirty clothes, found a coin operated laundry. 

We’re also big fans of Uber!!  We can schedule a pickup right at the boat launch for longer trips such as grocery shopping or the inevitable trip to West Marine.

Our days have been spent on the normal day to day chores as well as fixing the issues we had from our gulf crossing.  Russell was able fabricate and weld a new piece to fix the broken stay.  I’ve resealed all of the windows on the forward half of the boat.  We added latches to some of the cabinets that wouldn’t stay closed and I made lee cloths for the bunks.  We’ve also ordered a painfully expensive part for the autopilot. 

There is a full service marina across the bay so we pulled anchor, motored over and filled our tanks with diesel and fresh water.  We were also able to pump out the holding tanks. We came back and re-anchored in the same spot to wait for our autopilot part.  Unfortunately, there now seems to have been an issue with the shipping. Our original plan was to have it dropped off at a local UPS office near the park. When we called in the order the vendor told us they only ship FedEx so we changed the delivery address to a FedEx office. Turns out they shipped it UPS which will not be accepted at a FedEx office. We attempted to have it re-routed but for some reason just received an email shipping notice that it was routed back to the vendor. I guess this is just a small preview of what we can expect if we have to wait for deliveries once we’re in the islands so we might as well chill out here while we wait. Chill out being more than just an expression in our case as it was in the 30s last night! Ready to get moving south.