Sandy Feet

We spent a week on Sandy Feet, a 50-foot 1/2 a million dollar yacht, tied to the dock at the Marriott Marina on Hutchinson Island in Florida this February vacation. Ken, my wonderful and adventurous husband, went down a week before me. When he called mid-week and told me he fell on board and cut both of his big toes on the bottom of the little refrigerator doors (loosing one toe nail in the process), I should have known this would be a memorable trip.

Although the boat had 2 bathrooms, the waste tanks they were connected to were small. There was a set of lights right next to the flush button for each toilet. Green (which I only saw once for a short time) means, empty. Yellow means we're filling up; orange means you got a little room left and red means, don't flush. When I arrived, a week after my husband had been there with his friend, one bathroom flush light was orange and the other yellow. This was Saturday and the boat waste is pumped out on Wednesday. Oy was all I said to my husband...so, we follow the rule, "If it's yellow let it mellow?." I had forgotten what it was like to live on a boat.

The day I arrived my husband also decided to do laundry. For some reason I wasn't in favor of using the tiny washer/dryer combo but taking no heed, my husband put in laundry soap, a full load of shorts, shirts, and socks, and shut the door to the DEMON. Twenty-eight hours later we scooped the laundry out, wet, and hung it around the cabin. "Try the reset button," we were told. Nope, that didn't work. "Turn it to off," we were advised. Sorry, that didn't work either. "Let it run through another cycle" we thought. Let's check the manual I thought so I downloaded it and read through each step. Yea, that was ineffective. The only thing that finally worked was for me to call the company that makes the DEMON, in Portland, Oregon. Their advice worked, "Turn off the fuse and wait 14 minutes." Weird.

The second night I was there I laughed out loud as my husband asked me, "Are you eating crackers?" I was scratching the bottoms of my feet. I had 30 bug bites from the soles of my feat to my neck. Bed bugs? Well, that did run through my mind but I assumed something more boring....and as the pharmacist said, "Noseems." A little bug spray and I was no longer host to invisible little bugs that seemed to find me tasty.

Otherwise, we had a fabulous trip!