An “Ah-Ha” Moment; “Nautigirl”

Yesterday morning, My Foxy Flautist (yes, that is a new one!) wanted to play her flute with an accompanying CD, but our 15 year old five disk CD player wouldn’t play, and even the door needed a butter knife to help pry it open. She said, “Well, I guess it’s time to get a new one...” “Au contraire, ma Cherie!” Being an inveterate do-it-yourself repair guy when my meager skills aren’t stressed too badly, I decided to see if I could fix the recalcitrant device myself. After removing the six screws holding the cabinet cover on, I opened the CD player to find... Fernando Varela blocking the CD player’s laser reader. Okay, so the singer wasn’t actually inside the player, but his CD had somehow gotten jammed between the CD laser reader and the carousel tray. Removing Fernando solved the “no-play” problem, and it looks like the sticky door issue is due to a stretched-out rubber drive belt, about the size of a thick rubber band. A new belt is now on order, and I think that change will make the CD player as good as new. 

We had a real treat last night... we showed our Atlantic Crossing video to a hundred or so friends at the Seabreeze Rec Center here in The Villages. We actually made the trip in 2005, from Beaufort, NC, to Bermuda, then to the Azores, and finally to Cascais, near Lisbon, Portugal. The trip took us about six weeks, and one of our crewmembers was a professional videographer. 

Here is “Nautigirl”, showing off her tee shirt with signal flags actually spelling out "Nautiboy", but as everyone knows, I'm anything but naughty. (She looks like she is having too much fun.) I think everyone saw a different side of Suzanne during the movie. She jokes that everyone would know that she went days without makeup... and very little sleep... aboard a 46 foot sailboat in constant motion. 

If you have never been aboard a small boat in the middle of the Atlantic, it's sort of like riding inside a washing machine, except the spin cycle is a bit slower. Here we are with a spinnaker set and the Portuguese island of Flores, in the Azores, in the distance. "Land HO!" after 16 days and 1,800 miles from Bermuda.  It was a boatload of fun sharing our adventures and great memories with our friends.