May the usual disclaimer suffice: Kindly forgive my lack of progress herein. Here's how spring and summer went:
First, we took up sailing. Daysailing on the Schooner Appledore 2 in Key West, before she headed north to Maine for the summer.
The Appledore 2 actually won a regatta this year, the Wreckers Cup, a race under sail from Key West Harbor to Sand Key. We were on the ship at the time, faithfully working to rid the boat of excess beer. Here's Sand Key Light:
Grace bought me birthday dinner at Sunset Key.
Then, there was a large amount of concern, prompted by government-back predictions, that our Paradise was going to be destroyed due to the negligence of a few jerks at British Petroleum. Although the Keys apparently beat the odds (by way of the Loop Current moving to an advantageous configuration), it was a very depressing time. We went to the Dry Tortugas while we still could, fearing ourselves among its last visitors. The trip was another birthday gift from Grace to me (thanks again). Here's Fort Taylor:
We came by way of the Yankee Freedom II ferry, although other folks came via a fancy seaplane (cue Treetop Flyer):
The beaches of the Dry Tortugas were like nothing I'd ever seen before.
This was my first time ever snorkeling (but not the last!)
We were very enchanted by this, so we repeated the act of snorkeling many times in Cudjoe Bay near home, as well as the American Shoal Light (5 miles south on the reef). I captained the 18-foot bowrider through the treacherous seas (okay so we can only make it in the bowrider if NOAA is calling for 1-foot seas or less).
That is the light. The water visibility can be amazing here, just like at the Tortugas.
Finally, we decided to stop burning so much gas in the powerboat, and we kayaked around a bit.
About two weeks ago, we decided to check out the Tarpon Belly Keys:
We made it pretty quickly, after carefully timing the tides to carry us North from the Blimp Road ramp where we had launched. Aren't we smart? We found a nice beach on the southwest side of Tarpon Belly Key and swam for hours.
Eventually, we decided the tides had probably turned, and it was time to head back. We picked a bad time to turn south across Cudjoe Channel towards blimp road. The wind was picking up and sending whitecaps from southeast to northwest. For some reason, we figured we'd faced odds like this before and made it. I'm pretty sure we had. But not, it turns out, in water quite this deep. More to the point, we found ourselves nearly parallel to those oncoming whitecaps, which is not what you want to do with a kayak, and the reason for that is, it has a tendency to pitch over and send you swimming. Which is what happened. Grace chased down our gear as it floated with us in 9-12 feet of swiftly-moving, bumpy water. A damned inconvenient situation, that. Fortunately it only lasted approximately 5 minutes, before we were saved by The IV Seas, a 25-foot Mako. Here's a picture of that boat homeported in our neighborhood canal in Cudjoe:
They dropped us and our kayak back off at the Blimp Road ramp, and we stayed indoors after that. We beat Zelda 2 for the Nintendo Entertainment System:
and Castlevania for the NES:
And Ancient Land of Y's for the Apple IIGS. And Secret Of Monkey Island for DOS/VGA. And, okay, enough indoors stuff. We eventually got back on the water:
And that was my summer. There's more to it than that (I lost a ton of income, faced insolvency, then got it all back at the last minute), but it isn't important.