It’s not like face painting, Chris and I are not painting little maple leafs on our behinds, though that might be fun. This is much more exciting: We’re putting anti-fouling paint on the hull of the boat, the last step before launching tomorrow.

As Chris mixes the paint and I gear up—gloves, goggles, a long-sleeved shirt, most important a ball cap so I don’t get bottom paint in my hair. A young man who has been hired to paint the boat beside us, a beautiful 54-foot ketch, wanders over to see what we’re doing. In fact, he does a lot more wandering around than painting.

“You doing that yourself?”

“Yep.”

“You have a boat like this and a nice car and you do your own work.”

“Uh huh.”

The young man runs his hands through his hair and shambles over to the next boat to see what’s happening there. It’s not clear to me that inhaling paint fumes every day has done him any good.

We always do our own bottom work—actually, we do all our own work, but painting the bottom gives us a chance to inspect every inch of it, check all the through-hulls, make sure all is well. Because if the bottom isn’t sound, nothing else matters.

It also gives us a chance to reminisce about the past season.

“Remember the reef off Athol Island?” I say to Chris as I paint over a sizeable dent in the front of the keel.

“Yeah, that was dumb,” he says.

We’d been sailing all day, it was getting dark, and rather than going the extra distance to the anchorage at Rose Island, which is easier to enter, we were trying to pick our way into the tiny anchorage at Athol. Chris admits that he shouldn’t have taken the shortcut through the reef.

But no harm done. Our keel is solid steel and it can take a lot.

As I work away, painting the seams and the rudder and around the through-hulls, I think of all the other places we’ve painted the bottom, the most memorable in the boatyard in Portugal. We were a curiosity there too, doing our own boat work. A crew of North Africans was sandblasting the boat beside us, pop music blaring. But at dusk, everyone left and we had the boatyard to ourselves. We’d sit in the cockpit and watch the fishing boats coming in, watch the sun set behind the church on the hill in Lagos.

Here, when we’re not working on the boat, we go walkabout, taking in the sights of Titusville, the man who lives in a van in the park beside the marina and feeds pigeons and squirrels and curiously, egrets, who you wouldn’t really expect to beg for peanuts. We give the ponds in the park a wide berth, and never go wading—we have a healthy respect for alligators. Some days we wander through the town, admiring the murals.

One stormy day, we drove across the Intracoastal Waterway and through the wildlife sanctuary on Merritt Island to the ocean to check out the surf. There was a huge storm out in the ocean, with 9-meter waves (yes, those are kind of big) and there was supposed to be a big surf running, but it wasn’t as spectacular as we had hoped.

The bottom is painted now and Chris has been up the mast to install new spreader lights and check the rigging. I’d say we’re good from top to bottom. And we’re pretty much provisioned, ready to launch in the morning. Believe me, trying to figure out what provisions we’ll need for five months in Cuba, where foreigners can’t really buy anything, has been a daunting task. But I think we’re good. We can live on chickpeas, if need be. Sailors don’t die of scurvy any more. Do they??

I guess we’ll find out.

Where in the world is MonArk?