Saturday evening the City once again held the annual lighted (Christmas) boat parade. For the first time in several years we did not participate. Olivia is in Rockport, and she may soon have a new owner and home. Anyway, after talking it over with ITJ, who maintains that Island Time is a proper cruising boat, and that he wouldn’t disrespect her like that, I was glad that I decided to abstain this year. There were just no funds or time for that this year and besides,  I have been dialed in on trying to get El Caribe II ready to head south with this spring. I know I’ve tried to set this before, but now there is a consensus to just get it done, and so I have set a general departure date of between March and May. I will firm up the actual date as the winter progresses and I get the most important items accomplished.  

Anyway, the more I thought about it the more that what ITJ had said made perfect sense to me.

Olivia, a proper cruising boat had gotten mad at me because I dressed her up for a dog and pony show, humiliated her. So for New Years a couple of years ago, I got appendicitis as a reward for making her mad. And just last week, I had a most sobering and painful experience, a kidney stone. I now believe that this is as a result of disrespecting ECII by having gone up and visited Olivia a couple of weekends ago. I will have to watch myself in the future.

Boats get jealous of other boats you know.

We were lounging about on the back porch overlooking the marina turning basin, the remnants of the old Anchor Marina, a now polished turd of a place called Pelicans Point or some such nonsense, watching the 13 boats in the parade ranging from a lighted kayak to Murphy’s Law, a lumbering old head boat that was busted a few years ago by NOAA selling illegal red snapper fillets to Amberjacks on the Island and is now relegated to the demeaning task of taking tourists out on dolphin and eco tours, and of course lighted Christmas Boat Parades. The Murphy’s have been around for a long time and are deeply ingrained in the inbred culture that some towns seem to generate, a culture borne of back door deals, executed by the nod and the wink of the eye. Don’t get me wrong. I like all of them. When the causeway went down the Murphy’s immediately volunteered to ferry stranded residents across the bay to the mainland, never hesitating or even asking, as far as I know about ‘compensation. For that is the virtuous side of the same kind of small town.

The day had been ideal, a day after a short lived norther where the wind just sort of lays down, the water goes from angry to blue in about twenty minutes and a beautiful cool evening follows. The few boats all crammed together in the turning basin produced a most spectacular light show on the mirror surfaced water.

ITJ takes me aside and whispers; “I’ve got to show you something.” “ Something very disturbing…..I’m very serious about this”, he says, as I follow him inside, to the kitchen, to the refrigerator. “Since I consider you a friend” he continued “I felt as though I could show this to you”. He flung open the freezer door and there sitting on a pile of various and sundry food items was the LAST remaining coconut ice garnered from the coconuts we brought in after our delivery of Island Time in August. The last several remaining cubes of magical low latitude elixir which properly consumed with the quality rhum produces a state of ecstasy as great as any sailor knows….it is the aqua vitae, the holy grail and the sirens song all rolled into one….it curative and soothing, necessary for the well being of the soul, it is……

ALMOST GONE!

So right then and there I was glad that I stuck to my tack and did not even for an instant consider dressing up El Caribe II  for the event. No, now more than ever the trip South will soon be even more imperative. How could one exist without rum and coconut water?