It’s over so quickly! I’m sitting in Floresville, Texas. It’s 100 degrees outside. MA’ALAHI sits on the hard in a cow pasture 11 miles west of Lake Okeechobee, Florida. We own a truck and a cell phone. Went to get my Texas driver’s license renewed … they had to have my social security CARD, which is on the boat, found an old 1099 form in storage which eventually sufficed. BEING BACK SUCKS!!

We arrived in Florida at the end of June, then with only 30 miles to our final destination, we received a glancing blow from lightning that took out our autopilot, radar, inverter/charger, battery monitor, solar panel regulator, antenna tuner, PACTOR modem and stereo. At first I thought it had also taken the ham radio, but when I unplugged the PACTOR modem the radio was working fine. And now that we finally got the boat hauled and safely into dry storage and we successfully made the drive to Texas, we are very relieved that we came out as good as we did … it could have been a heck of a lot worse! At the time of the storm we were motoring up the Caloosahatchee River right at downtown Fort Myers, negotiating the narrow channel on a Sunday afternoon, very crowded with all manner of pleasure boats and holding our breath as we maneuvered under the 55-foot bridges with our 53-foot tall mast! We had made it under the first bridge okay, before the storm, but then the blinding rain and 50-knot winds hit us and we couldn’t see the channel markers or the bridges or the other boats until we were right on top of them. There was close lightning all around but at the time it was the least of my concerns. We got just a little visibility back right at the entrance to the next bridge and we stayed in the middle of the channel but the wind waves were lifting us and I really feared we’d crunch the bridge. Just as we exited the highway 41 bridge it got hit by lightning and we got hit with a ricochet. The first thing I noticed was that the depth sounder was off, then the autopilot and gps. Then I smelled burning wire insulation and was afraid we had a fire but I couldn’t find any and the smell slowly dissipated. We continued on to our anchorage where I discovered the good news and the bad. The good was that the depth sounder, gps and radio came out undamaged and that there had not been a fire. The bad news, other than the equipment that is damaged, and scary thing was that the VHF antenna was gone! Apparently we did hit that last bridge and it snapped off the antenna which takes up the 52nd and 53rd feet of our mast. Anyway, we haven’t been able to do radio email since then and so our new address for the time being is this HOTMAIL account. Please keep us posted on your travels while we try to figure out how we can cope with being back in this dreadful place!

Will update again soon.

David and Claudia