CHAPTER FIVE: SLOW MOTION IS STILL NO MOTION

CHAPTER FIVE: SLOW MOTION IS STILL NO MOTION

Here we are still at the Marina Bay Marina, up the New River in sunny, humid Ft. Lauderdale. And it’s Thursday, June 14. So if you have read Chapter 4 of this blog, your question is: Why didn’t you leave the marina and head out on your maiden voyage to Lake Worth on Tuesday, June 12?

Short answer: Chase.

Chase – that’s the one that “lost” 3 billion dollars recently in risky investments – contacted me Monday night that they finally finished my application to re-finance my mortgage at a lower interest rate and I needed to find a place to sign the documents “right away”.  I asked a few questions, like are the documents really in final form? What are the terms of the loan? And of course, the terms had a higher interest rate than what I had agreed upon in mid-April. So I was told to contact the mortgage banker (I was talking to the loan processor) and “work it out”, or we would have to junk more than 3 months of “work”. I put “work” in quotes because I doubt that much time or effort was spent since March to process this loan. The interest rate is too low for the bank’s appetite, but it is what they offered based on interest rates in April.

Okay, your eyes are glazing over just like mine did while reading and signing fifty pages yesterday. And this is not a banking blog. I leave that to my nephew Dwight. I’m sure Bank of America has some very funny anecdotes he could share with us. Suffice it to say, after much insistence from Orlando that he could not give me the rate he agreed upon, he gave me the rate we agreed upon. He claimed he had no record of the agreement. Save your emails. That is the lesson learned – again. My May 2 email was the clincher, listing the rate we had agreed upon. He never responded to this email and never disagreed with the rate I had listed. How could he? He had agreed to it. So I will celebrate May 2^nd as the day I saved my low rate. Still the wordsmith, I guess. Remember, memorialize every important thing. Don’t expect anyone to rely on your memory alone, especially when they conveniently have no memory or their memory is “different” from yours.

Now the real guts of this blog. We got knee pads and sponges this afternoon, after hand washing the wood floor in the salon, galley, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths on our padless knees. We’re cleaning our Slow Motion before the maiden voyage. Right now, at 7:30 p.m. Art is removing the old cracking caulk from around the edges of the floor of the flying bridge (where we steer the boat) and re-caulking everything. We hope this will mean no leaks from that deck when it rains. And Art is wearing our new knee pads to save what is left of his knees from this morning’s work.

Have you ever heard of “Goof Off”? Probably most glue sniffing and paint sniffing teens have. It is an amazing substance that cleans the worst black marks off white surfaces on a boat. But it has a smell that only a committed glue sniffer can stand. That smell stays in the humid, heavy air for a long time. Memo to self: use a mask next time.

Once we were forced to stay at this Marina to save the deal with Chase, we lost our window of smooth water. Whereas the waves were at 1 to 2 feet on Tuesday, now they’re at 7 to 12 feet in the areas we plan to visit the first day. And the wind has really picked up. So we have to sit out the stormy weather just north of us. And – you have every right to be dubious at this point – we plan to leave the Yacht Capital of the World, aka Humidity Capital of the World, aka Ft. Lauderdale, on Monday, June 18. Our Slow Motion should be sparkly clean by then.  Art should have completed a programming job. And I will have had practice in throwing ropes to a dock and jumping off to tie them with the right knots to hold Slow Motion in her slip. We have pored over our navigation maps. You can do that for a few hours, then you HAVE TO STOP, or, as your mother said, you will go blind. Come to think of it, viewing these devilishly detailed charts of the Intracoastal Waterway has many similarities to the perverse activity our mothers warned our brothers about.

When your plans go awry, there is always one thing you have to do in Florida – Go to the Keys. So we did that again and enjoyed the reopening of the Mandalay Bay Grill and Tiki Bar. There are lots of “Keys people” here, but the attraction of this place is that it is right on the water with outside seating and a refreshing breeze. Not a television in sight. They had fish dip, which we devoured. But that led us afterward to the old Fish House, which has “the best fish dip in the world” (Art’s opinion). And this place has gone from buying fish straight from the fishermen and selling them wholesale to opening a restaurant and a fishy deli with, of course, their famous fish dip. They have the same person at the counter, and she remembers Art and shared some stories with him – but this is definitely turning from blue collar to yuppie, with no stop at neighborhood market and no looking back.

As usual, however, and despite the changes to the Fish House, Key Largo provided Art with another few hours of total relaxation. Everyone needs one place in the world like this. Art showed me the”Boatel” where he had lived, when he was lobster fishing. Yep – you can pull right up to it in your boat and spend the night. We will return to the Keys in Slow Motion, when the insurance company lets up come back to Florida after November 1. And then we will fish and snorkel and – relax again. Not that cleaning Slow Motion isn’t a relaxing pastime. Let’s see – prepare a case for jury trial with 68 counts against a child molester or clean Slow Motion? I’m very happy with my choice. I hope you are all happy with yours as well.