It all happened very quickly. Or at least that’s how it seems. It took us a few days to travel up the intracoastal waterway to Titusville then there we were, back on the mooring ball we had left just three short months ago. A couple of days bobbing in the river then just as the sun was rising, we motored into Westland Marina and our date with the travel lift.

Now we’ve had the boat lifted out of the water in a lot of places but never has it been handled this professionally. Dave, the travel lift guy, asked all the right questions beforehand—how much does your boat weigh, is it a full keel, where exactly is the prop—then when we arrived, he inspected the rigging carefully, took a couple of measurements, and decided that we could leave the backstay up but we needed to back into the travel lift.

Like most full-keel boats, ours doesn’t back up straight. At all. So Chris rigged some lines and we hand-bombed it around, something we’ve done many times. The yard workers were very impressed.

Then straps under and up in the air it went. Boats should not be up in the air. Especially 20-ton steel boats. I try not to watch, but of course I can’t help myself. As the travel lift drove away, the well we’d been lifted out of filled with manatees.

“They love the well,” Angie, a yard worker, told me. “They always hang out here.”

One, two, three, then more, nosing around, loafing in the sun. One fell asleep lying on its back, floating just beneath the surface. Another swam over to a leaking tap to get a drink of fresh water.

They drink salt water, Angie explained. They can filter the salt out somehow, but it’s so much easier to drink fresh water when they can get it.

And now we’re on the hard, nestled in among palm trees. Preparing the boat to spend the summer in Florida is a new experience for us. No need to put antifreeze in the engine and hoses, but we do have to install a dehumidifier, plug all the through-hulls so creatures don’t climb into the boat, and cover it with some kind of netting so we don’t come back to a boat slick with bird droppings.

The derelict boat beside us, which has been here for at least fifteen years, has a resident osprey at the top of its mast. We find fish (well, what’s left of them anyway, after the osprey is done with them)—on the ground around the boat, and a half-grown black kitten has taken up residence next door, peeking out at us through the missing windows. Oh well, at least he’ll keep the rodent population down. And the snakes, I hope.

Today we finish packing then remove the canvas covers and everything else above deck that could blow away in a hurricane, install heavy-duty strapping which the yard workers will secure to “mafia blocks,” as they call the heavy concrete anchors they use here. And tomorrow we’ll leave our boat, which is now really a loft apartment in Titusville, and head to our other boat, the one in the meadow, just in time for the bluebirds to come back.