The Big Bend by Gary Showalter

Author:Gary Showalter [Showalter, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Booksurge
Published: 2009-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Wednesday, March 14 – Friday, March 16

Everglades City

Brock's Ridge

The marina had a small hotel alongside, run by the same family. Once Rosie was safely in the straps of the travel lift I grabbed my sea bag and headed for the marina office to handle the paperwork on the boat and then I headed for the hotel.

It wasn’t much, but it was nice and clean and the food in the restaurant was outstanding. I took a room, got a hot shower and then headed downstairs to get something to eat.

They served a nice lunch of blackened grouper with yellow rice, green beans, and corn bread, which I ate on the open deck beside the restaurant, under an umbrella. It was a nice leisurely afternoon.

After the meal I had a cold beer and watched the sun drop below the horizon. Everyone should treat himself like that, once in a while.

The next day I checked out my truck, making sure it would start after sitting for so long. Once I had it running I headed over to a service station to check the tire pressure, windshield washer fluid, fill the tank and so on.

I parked the truck near the repair yard and spoke to the foreman, Harry Rogers, about the state of Rosie’s hull and her general condition. Harry was a long-faced, darkly tanned, sixty-year-old geezer. He was whipcord thin and mean as a snake if he didn’t like you. For some reason, he liked me.

He said they could do the paint job in short order, but he wanted to spend some time (and my money) on an engine service since I’d had her running for so long on this trip. The engine hours were way up there, he said, and poor maintenance was bound to cause problems. He also mentioned that the electrical system should also be checked to make sure there were no problems, since she’d been partially flooded.

I okayed that, too, so he went for the gold ring and mentioned that the bilge pumps should be checked since I’d had them running for hours at a stretch, too.

Well, he was right. I’d have to be a damn fool to go to sea with unreliable bilge pumps, and he knew it just as well as I did. “Harry, why do you even bother to ask me this stuff? Why don’t you just tell me what you’re going to do and how much it’s going to cost me?”

He spat a chaw of Red Man at a large palmetto bug on the edge of the gravel. “Shit, boy, where’s the fun in that?” He called one of his crew over and got him to begin pressure washing Rosie’s hull. He hit him, too.

The palmetto bug, I mean.

That done I went back to the hotel and bought a few polo shirts and another pair of khaki walking shorts. They also had a nice rugged pair of hiking sandals with nylon straps and Velcro closures instead of leather and brass buckles, so I bought them, too.

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