Synchronize your engines. 27◦19'.829 N 82◦32'.873 W

 We are now in Sarasota Fl, having had an uneventful day....mostly!

 This morning we set off from the marina at 7:30 and making our way down the inter costal waterway, we zigged when we should have zagged or a shoal appeared out of nowhere ....whatever. Bottom line is, we hit bottom.  When we did, all of  sudden we started feeling a vibration and we had no port rudder. Our props are too high to hit ground when our bottom hits, but we thought  maybe we bent the rudder. So our story for today is about synchronizing. With two engines running, the humming of two different frequencies can get a little tiring. To fix this problem we have a synchronizer on the engines. Once we are up to 10,000 rpm or so, we click on the synchronizer and magically, the engines start working in unison and the vibrations and humming are reduced. Once the engines are synchronized, the  accelerator for the port engine is no longer needed, and we manage the speed with only the starbord engine's throttle. This is all lovely until you hit something! Florida is very shallow; did I mention that already?

The sunshine bridge 

 About 30min after we hit; Jim still trying to trouble shoot the problem said "#@$, I wonder if the synchronizer popped out". He backed off the engine, re-engaged the synchronizer and voila, problem fixed; thereby avoiding the lengthy search of our insurance policy to see if we were covered for bent rudders!

We arrived in Sarasota by noon, so after lunch we went into town for a little touristy walk. The down town core is lovely.

Tomorrow, we aim for Charlotte Harbor, assuming we don't hit bottom again! I think we should upgrade our insurance to the Gold policy!

One last note, for those of you who are not familiar with what a cleat should look like, I got you some before and after pictures. I have a nephew who is a welder. Pierre is this cleat something you can fix? Brass cleats are awfully hard to find these days.

Night all.