York Island, San Carlos Bay

Wednesday, 14 January 15                                                                                    14.8 SM

Roy the Neighbor happens by and, noting Red warming to her work, offers a hand with the docklines.

“Here ya go,” says Roy, tossing the remaining stern line in the cockpit. “You’re free.”

Indeed. After yet another dockside stay that lingers well beyond the “plan,” Steadfast again is free of land and underway.

The “floor show” at Bruno’s is almost as good as the food!

She’d returned to Fort Myers Yacht Basin so Crew could make a flight to visit family for the weekend.  It was a productive weekend aboard, small tasks but ones needing to be done.  More lurking, as always, so Sunday became Monday, then a good scrub of the decks Tuesday.  Cabin, too.  There was the lure of dinner–again–at Bruno’s of Brooklyn where Cal and Company plate pasta and sides just like Mama used to make.  And before you know it, another day in the slip (ya can’t leave on the 13th, after all) and Wednesday awaits.

It’s 1135 now, a day not quite as the Chamber of Commerce promotes nor as Accu-Guess advertised. Instead, nine-knots of northerly sweep under a thick carpet of clouds. No sun sneaks through so the air feels far more chill than the 68-degrees reported. Not nearly as chill as say in Hallieford, Virginia, for example, but not a day for the beach.

So Red kicks her in a generally southward direction down the Caloosahatchee, across San Carlos Bay and up toward the entry to Pine Island Sound. That’s where she sits now, in eight-feet of water, quarter-mile off the east shore of York Island. Now and again, a motor yacht or fishing boat makes its passing known, sending a wake off the waterway that sets Steadfast to rolling a bit. But just a bit and she seems not to mind.

After all, she’s free.

Steadfast out.