Basil-ites and Orega-nodes

April 28 - May 4, 2008

Sunday, May 04, 2008 - Vero Beach Municipal Marina, Vero Beach, FL
By Tom

Another week passes and we continue to make forward progress despite our best efforts.

It occurred to me that I never got a chance to tell you about our clearing back in to the US. For those of you who don't know, when a private (pleasure) vessel returns from out of the country, that vessel and it's crew are required to report to an authorized border patrol security location and go through the process of clearing customs and immigration.

Normally, you would do this at an international airport, but as there are some difficulties getting a 40 foot sailing cat to the local airport, other arrangements have to be made. In theory, I was supposed to have pre-ordered a sticker from customs. This sticker would provide me with a magic number to allow the government to know to expect my return at some point. Now, I would have thought just me being a citizen would have been a good indicator, but apparently it is not.

Anyhow, this sticker can only be gotten 12 months in advance and only in the year you intend to return. Our problem comes in here as we have been out of the country for the last 25 months. Hmm, ok no sticker.

So, upon arrival back in the US, we are supposed to call a Customs office and report our arrival. Of course, because we haven't been here in over two years, we no longer have a cell phone and regulations say we cannot get off the boat until we call for permission. Hmm.

And next up, after reporting our arrival by borrowed phone, we now have 24 hour to present ourselves for a face to face interview with a customs official. Of course they only work Monday to Friday, 10 am - 4 pm, so you need to plan your arrival accordingly.

Now since this blog is public record, I do not want to cover the specifics of exactly how we managed to get ourselves checked back in, but rest assured dear reader we are once again legally back in our home country and to the best of my knowledge, no federal, state, or local laws were violated.

By the way, if you make your "I am home, please start my 24 hour-check in or I die clock" after hours, say Saturday afternoon around 2 pm, by virtue of there not being anyone open and on duty, it seems that by default you get an extension until the following Monday, but your my mileage myay vary.

The actual presenting of ourselves was kind of anti-climactic as the 2 uniformed officers looked at our passport, said welcome home and then sent us on our way. I was surprised that there was no paper work to fill out, no fee to be paid, no mention of our lack of sticker and no full body cavity search. Hmm.

Anyhow, lots of administrative stuff got taken care of this week, mostly because we had run up against the government imposed deadlines on several items and had no choice but to deal with the beaurocracy that is the US.

We stopped in at the local DMV (the driver license place) to inquire what the rules and requirements were for me to get a new Florida license. My Maryland issued license is set to expire on my birthday in about 3 weeks, but the DMV lady behind the counter said all I needed was my old license and my social security card.

Excuse me?!? That's it?? Really ?

Yup, the fine ladies at the Vero Beach office were so helpful we went ahead and changed my license over then and there and twenty minutes and $55 dollars later, I walked out with a new license. I absolutely cannot believe how easy that was!

Of course, keep in mind that Florida was the state of registry for 18 of the 20 terrorists on the 9-11 thing, so I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. I do know that in Maryland, this same things would have taken at least two days and would have easily run three or four hundred dollars.

See, the problem is that Amy and I both have class A, CDL licenses, which are issued by the federal government, and as such there are strict federal guidelines that are supposed to apply. Whether right or wrong, Maryland would have required me to be finger printed, drug tested, have a new DOT physical, a federal background check and re-take at least three different written tests pertaining to the handling of hazardous materials and all things tractor. All this despite the fact that I have not driven nor do I intend to, drive a big rig anytime soon.

In an case, for the expediency of their DMV alone, I may never leave Florida.

Once armed with my new license, Amy wasted no time in dragging Team Dream Catcherto the public library where as a tax paying citizen of the state, I was awarded a brand new library card for free. Remember, free is good. I am certain that no one will be surprised that Amy wasted no time checking out the 15 book maximum limit before we returned to the boat.

As an intersting aside, this was the first time I have been inside a library since my senior year in high school. By the way, who knew that you couldn't score a beer in the non fiction section? Books are just lame man.

In other news, we spent two full days getting a new cell phone. After having gone so long without one, we both forgot what was involved in acquiring a new phone. We took the ghetto bus out to the mall area and perused three different stores trying to determine what program best fit our needs (read: was cheapest).

It seems that every major player in the cell phone market wants to tie you in to some elaborate contract of hidden fees, extreme termination penalties and death star oaths of felty. And who needs unlimited time period specific, galactically available, roll over, ad-infinitum minutes? Why can't they just say "X dollars for Y minutes per month"?

Remembering all the trouble we had with Verizon when we first left the country to go cruising, neither one of us was too keen on going back to them. Out of some misplaced sense of loyalty (my dad retired from Verizon) we did finally call and check out their program and I can safely say that it sucks balls.

Right or wrong, no matter what I told the Verizon dork, I could not make her understand that I don't need 10,000 minutes a month. Do you realize that to use 10,000 minutes a month you'd have to be on the phone almost six hours a day! And all of this for the low, low price of $120 a month?

I think not.

This same general conversation was repeated with both Sprint and AT&T over the following hour and a half.

Feeling beaten down by the man, we moved on and checked out the T-Mobile display, mostly because their little kiosk had a life size cut out of Catherine Zeta Jones and she was pretty hot in that Ocean's Twelve movie. As an aside, what is she doing with that dork Michael Douglas? Isn't he old enough to be her dad?

Ok, so basically the T-Mobile literature convinced us to give them a try. It was nineteen dollars for the phone and six cents a minute to call anywhere in the U.S. We pre-purchased one hundred dollars worth of air time good for one year and we were on our way. Total phone expenditure was a whopping $120.

Based on our previous experience with minute usage, I am estimating that we should have 200 minutes left when we bounce of the one year barrier, 364 days from now.

Ok, enough of our re-entry in to all things American. On the boating front we tackled several projects this past week, which I have highlighted below.

First off, I removed the old deck hatch rings on the two forward anchor lockers and replaced them with new, over stock units that I scored at the boat flee market a couple of weeks ago with Willis. The new units were slightly larger than the originals, so I had to widen the hole somewhat with my saber saw, but it wasn't a big deal. We can now once a gain lift our anchor locker hatches without resorting to the use of needle nose pliers. The results turned out well enough that we are going to pick up four more replacement latches the next time we are down in Fort Pierce so we can do the remaining four deck hatches.

On another front, Amy attacked the stainless steel on deck. We had been kind of lax in keeping the stainless clean and shiny ever since we ran out of our supply of Collinite's No. 350 Metal Wax late last year. By the way, the afore-mentioned product is by far the best metal wax I have ever used. Thanks to Frank from Gecko for the tip.

Also on the menu, I installed a new (used) co-pilot seat that we also got from the sailboat flee market place. It is an exact replica of the one we use at the helm and it bolted to our existing pedestal structure without issue. The chair itself had never been used, but it was in the bargain bin as there was little lip of plastic around the seam where the chair popped out of the mold. Twenty minutes with the dremmel tool and it was as good as new. We still need to make some new cushions for both chairs, but the cockpit comfort level has gone way up.

We also planted a small herb garden in two, small, plastic containers. We sort of cheated and got herbs that were already growing rather than little seeds that needed to be planted, but this was due to the fact that the already growing plants were actually cheaper than a package of seeds. The only explanation I can come up with for this is that maybe the seed packet are for like more than one plant of a given variety. You know, like maybe there are 600 tomato plants in that little package as opposed to my one potted plant right? Maybe?

Other members of our tiny garden include an oregano colony, a basil habitat, a couple of radical green onion off-shoots and some sort of thyme commune. Hopefully our little farm will soon be producing fresh herb goodness, but this largely depends on how successful we are at maintaining the current cease fire between the basil-ites and orega-nodes. This in turn assumes that we can keep Milo from executing a pre-emptive, global domination first strike and eating all the plant life first.

And finally, I have completely disassembled the Mercury 15 dinghy engine top end and started the process of rebuilding it. It was still running ok, but after three dunkings over the last two years, it was due some tender love and care. While I have it apart, I am in the process of fixing the choke cable situation which has been broken for the last 18 months. To do this, I need to fabricate a special part back at my brother in laws machine shop, so this job is on hold until I fly home.

So that about brings you up to speed. I fly home to visit my family on Wednesday and Amy will be staying behind to watch the weasels. The plan is to get my motorcycle out of storage and ride it back down to Amy and the boat so that we'll have some wheels and be able to get around a little better.

Oh yeah, for those of you wondering about the engine swaps, nothing has happened on that front as I am waiting on some wiring information from Yamaha regarding how to mate the old style harness to the new style engine. I probably won't get back to this until next week after my trip home.

Ok, talk to you later.

P.S. - Way to go Penguins, we're one series win away from another trip to the Stanley Cup!