Thanks to the incredible efforts of the team at Sailing Servies, we were now in possession of the supplies needed to replace the back and fore stays. My pal Vanessa had graciously driven us about to look at options in either a marina or on a wall in a working yard somewhere. We didn’t need a haul out, just enough room to lay out the wire and install it all. Barring any mishaps, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.
Marinas in Key West are ridiculously expensive. Supply and demand are the cause I suppose, but we did not feel that we would be getting value for money in a marina in Key West. We felt even more strongly when we realized that we only needed a few hours on a dock to switch out the stays. Thanks to Vanessa, we were able to find room on a wall for a reasonable price on Stock Island. Once the work was done, we could go back to our anchorage near the bight and wait for weather to begin our journey North.
The yard was almost completely barren, save the stacks of homemade boats migrants had used to float into the U.S. and crab pots stacked, waiting to be loaded onto the decks of. This was a yard used by the real workman of the Keys, the professional fisherman. Despite the yard looking like a Mad Max set, this was a great no-frills, get her done kind of place.
We came in on high tide because we well remember what Stock Island is like with a 6foot draft from the last time we were here, also for work in a yard on Stock Island. It certainly wasn’t ideal as there was a rock shelf under the bow of Ceol Mor that was nervously close at low tide but it all worked out. We got the stay replaced in a fairly straight forward fashion. After a few hours of rerigging, it was time for tea.
We picked up a pizza from my favorite Stock Island restaurant find from 2016, Roostica. I don’t know if it was just the fact that the pizza quality was every bit as good as I remembered or if was relief from having a big job ticked off the to do list adding a little bit more to the enjoyment of the pizza but this was one of my favorite restaurant experiences in the Keys. As the moon rose and night fell, we slept crawled into bed and slept soundly indeed.
