Another birthday this week: Mira’s birthday, the last one of four while away from home. We have celebrated it nice and quietly with our own family. With a healthy start of the day by joining a 5 km run at 7.30 am in Boca Raton Spanish River Athletic Park, organized by Harrie’s store The Runners Edge. Followed by getting some nice (own made) presents and eating home-made ‘appeltaart’ with Jack & Jackie (who arrived in the morning and are staying the coming week). Ending the day by the four of us eating out at Benihana’s, with the staff singing for me during desert with a candle on my ice cream.

Last week Harrie, when visiting us with his daughter Lily for a planned sailing trip, talked me into joining the 5 km run. Unfortunately we never made it to go sailing because of a miscalculation of the tide and the corresponding waterlevel. We already got stuck within the first few meters, although 2 hours after High Water (HW). The previous times this time schedule worked. Well, not this time and the only thing we could do is make it back to the dock before we really got stuck and might have to stay there for 7-8 hours. Instead of sailing we had a nice day outside in the backyard, talking and swimming (at least Eline and Lily). We will save the sailing for some other day.

I am glad Harrie convinced me to join this 5 km run. It was lots of fun and I did not bad with a time of 30.40 min after three weeks of not so much practice. The trail winded around two small lakes in beautiful surroundings. Amazing to find such a natural landscape in this densely populated area. The goal for the next 5 km run is 29 min 😉.

This ‘getting stuck incident’ in our own channel resulted in two further investigations. The first one is marking the dock to indicate the mimimum waterlevel we need to get out. This is more accurate than just 2.5 hours before and after HW. The mark works fine, we checked it out by going out of the channel and coming back with at two spots slightly touching the ground. Now we further analyse what the level of the mark is in relation to the tides table.

The second investigation is studying the use of a forward looking sonar by looking up information on the internet. Toine has found a useful site called Attainable Adventure Cruising. Very informative about all kinds of cruising subjects. We subscribed for $1 per month and have access to lots of useful information. The forward looking sonar might be a good investment for us. It gives insight in the depth 30 meters or more ahead. That helps to see shallow spots in the ICW and in less charted anchor spots. It also helps to see icebergs 100 meters ahead. Our neighbor Steve happens to have one on his new boat and we are welcome to test it with him sometime next week.

Toine further improved his business proposition a few steps and made a lot of phonecalls. This week he has been in The Netherlands for some business meetings.

Mira is still enjoying her English classes. We went on a fieldtrip to the movie The Post. An excellent movie with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks about publishing secret information about the Vietnam War and the relationship between the press and government. The setting is around 1970, but with very much relevance for today. With a lot of difficult dialogues, good for practicing our English. I had seen it with Toine the week before and missed some parts in the dialogues. So no problem to have seen it for the second time. However, in the middle of the movie at an important moment the screen suddenly went black and the movie stopped. They couldn’t get it going anymore and we got our money back and a free ticket for another movie. So today we again go to the same movie and now I have seen it 2.5 times 😅.

Marinthe made good progress playing tennis. She joins the full program without any difficulty, including mental training by a very good mental coach. We have signed in for a few tournaments, the first one in the weekend of Feb 3-4.

This week Toine is in The Netherlands and Jackie & Jack are here getting organized on the new boat.

We might lower the frequency of posting a blog. We are somewhat settled with a fixed schedule, so not always enough new things to write about on a weekly basis 😊.