Mar 13 - on the water

I went over to ACE Hardware and picked up some clamps to continue working on my Brevet Bike. With those, I finished the installation of the frame-mounted rack and attached the two battery operated taillights to the vertical supports for the rack. That gets the weight from those lights down lower. I drilled holes in the rack and attached the dynamo powered light. I think that I'm set -- other than the frame pump that is supposed to arrive in Monday's FEDEX delivery. My only risk with this setup is that the clamps to the seatstays do not hold and the rack moves down. Short of finding someone who can do some titanium welding, I'm not sure what else I could do. That is an option, of course, but an ugly one. As insurance, I suppose that I could have guy wires, so to speak, from the saddle rails to the rack -- that's an interesting thought .... hmmm.

I'm planning on riding a 200k Permanent on Tuesday that originates in DeLand, about 35 miles away. Dan Wallace, one of the organizers on the Central Florida Brevets who works with Tim Bol, suggested that I hook up with Judith (think her last name is Longley) to do the ride, which I have. She and I rode together briefly during the 400k last weekend. She's a strong rider so we should be reasonably matched. From my exchange with her, she did back-to-back 1200km rides two years ago -- it will be interesting to hear about her experiences. The other thing that I'll be doing on that ride is testing out my rack setup. If it survives 200km without moving, it will probably survive 400km.

We left here around 10:30 yesterday driving south to the Haulover Canal. It was busy there, but there were a couple of empty parking slots so we did not have to go searching for another boat launch. The lane alongside the little ditch where we spotted the baby alligator last year was blocked off and taken up by a couple of large RVs, a trailer-sized generator and another trailer with a 500 gallon diesel tank. The Coast Guard were in residence ... with at least three boats there ... and the waterways were crawling with Sheriff, Police and Fish & Game boats. Wow -- do they ever patrol these waters when there is an impending launch ! The funny thing, of course, is that they think that they're not subject to the "no wake" rules and we saw one Sheriff boat cutting across the broad waterway west of the canal -- taking a short-cut so to speak, but then stopping in the middle and we could see a lot of water action. Well, much of that area is a foot deep or less during low tide and they'd clearly run aground. It's not the first time that we've seen a Coast Guard vessel stuck on the sand. We've seen it happen at Ponce Inlet as well.

We cruised down to Cocoa, stopping at one little island along the way to let Abby hunt minnows. She had a blast, as usual, and as we made our way back to the boat which was moored in about one foot of water we saw a few rays half buried in the sand.

Much of the trip down was flat calm -- glassy flat calm. It was great. We paid for it later though, as the latter 1/3 of the trip back was quite choppy and slower. We stopped at Cocoa and used the facilities at the park. You can leave boats there for up to three hours so it would be a nice trip down if we came for lunch. I'd have to bring some sort of chain and lock though.

On the way back we were treated to a waterway view of a military jet performing for the Mimms air show. He flew quite low over us, repeatedly, as he did his low approaches to that waterside town, doing barrel rolls over the town, going vertical etc. There was a plane flying over the Kennedy Space Center, making lazy turns in the airspace but not going anywhere -- I suspect that was an AWACS plane monitoring the air space. The last I looked the launch is still scheduled for tomorrow evening. It won't quite be dark at 7:43, the planned time, but dark enough that it will enhance the show. We're keeping our fingers crossed that Angelika will get to see the launch.

We got back home a little before 5pm and Sandy went over to OceanS Seafoods to pick up dinner. She got Pompano that had just come in as well as Tuna. We had the Tuna last night and we'll have the Pompano tonight.

We've integrated Angelika into our daily routine. Yes, she's watching Stargate SG1 too ... well, when her eye's are open that is -- and snacks and drinks with us. I have to admit though that the last two days my eyes have closed at one or two points. I've seen these episodes before -- that's my excuse.

Today, I'm going out for a bike ride. I haven't decided which bike to ride -- tough decisions ! If it weren't for the fact that I want to try out this rack setup it would be an easy decision.

That's it ... all that I can think of ...