Not Too Much Excitement …

We continue to work our way south, trying to keep ahead of the cold weather.  We often leave early; this was an especially gorgeous dawn.  See Venus over our yellow life ring?

Every day includes periods of too much to do and not enough to do.  One minute it’s:  Where’s the range marker?  That mark’s not on the chart!  Why am I in only 6.3 feet of water?  The marks don’t make sense.  Yikes, a cross current, pushing me out of the channel into shallow water!  That was as busy at it got today – totally flat water – no wind at all.  So no sailing, just a motor boat ride.  This is what absolutely flat calm looks like:

Which made, for want of a better phrase, a pretty boring ride.  For those of you frantically trying to keep up with your lives, here are some examples of a few of our most exciting moments aboard Motu Iti on this very slack day:

• We saw dolphins from a great distance – no pictures.
• A tiny lizard stowed away and we released him on shore.

• I got my Kindle to work again after it froze up.
• Goldwin swatted a fly.

• We met a boat from Kalamazoo, MI.
• Goldwin did his every-ten-years clean-up of “Ducky,” who has been our boat duck for almost 30 years.

• Goldwin installed a kitchen junk drawer for me.

• My red noodle escaped from the boat and Goldie took off in the dinghy to successfully retrieve it as it floated away on the current.

But the biggest event of all – we finally inflated our dinghy.  Our deflated, folded-up dinghy had been resting, at the ready, just behind the mast since we left in October.  After anchoring near Fort Frederica, we moved it to the bow and used the bellows to make the pile of hypalon into a little boat.  From this:

To this:

To this:

And then we took a little ride in it.  Since there was a current and we didn’t want to actually row too vigorously, we tied the painter to the back of Motu Iti and just drifted behind, drinking our wine.

And admiring our boat.