First thing this morning we met our new diver friend Scott Cummings who arrived promptly to remove our port propeller. He worked very efficiently and I assisted from the swim platform while Jan was in charge of documenting with photographs. The good news is that it came off fairly easy, did not appear to have any visible damage and Scott reported that all the sacrificial zincs looked good and there was no undue growth on the bottom. The bad news is this will not save us any real money because the prop must have an MRI scan to determine if there is some minute variation that is leading to our vibration at high speed.
I did a cursory examination on the dock with a ruler and it seems that one blade is perhaps a quarter inch out and that would account for our problem and should be a reasonably easy fix for a professional prop man. It will be Monday before we know more so we are settling in for a nice extended visit here in Lantana.
While we are stuck and propless it seemed a good time to visit one of our business investments that contribute to the cost of this trip. However the security guard did not seem to be impressed as I stepped up into the flower bed.
We rode a few miles over to the Lantana Beach which was really crowded. There is a narrower beach than at Hollywood but still very nice. A Ritz Carlton Hotel is right on the beach which was a bit of a surprise until we remembered all the pricy homes we had seen the day before.
Lunch was at the Dune Deck Cafe which is apparently pretty well known in this area as it was the very first lunch establishment where we have had to take a beeper unit and wait to be buzzed for a table and then the thing actually spoke to us! This restaurant is located in a public beach park but directly abuts the Ritz Carlton beach bar and is staffed as if the Ritz was running it. A fine dining experience. I had the chicken fingers and Jan had a hot dog.
After luncheon we rode to the Winn Dixie which was much further than we had been told but no trouble for two experienced cyclists. Unfortunately the news down here has been filled with the story of a poor cyclist who was hit by a car and killed several days ago on the Rickenbacher Causeway on Key Biscayne right where we had been riding. So I suppose we are a bit more vigilent riding today.
As I close tonight I wish to demonstrate graphically a point I made recently about Jan continuing to astound me with her abilities as a pilot. Yesterday when we arrived at this marina we were assigned a slip between two other boats about our size. The wind was blowing and the current running. We had to back in. The slip was narrow but I did not realize just how narrow until this morning. Our boat is 13’10” wide at the widest point. She never even touched the sides coming in. Look at the pictures and you do the math.
We loaded up on supplies since we will be here longer than expected. It included a twelve pack of soft drinks and added to the two gallon gas can I had picked up earlier at the Ace Hardware we were accumulating more than we could carry easily. A little creative packing and we were pedaling back to Murelle’s.
