Oops........

You probably live in a house..........with a driveway, a yard, a sidewalk.........etc. Now imagine for a minute that everything you see outside your house that is green........is blue.........as in blue, wet, and deep. That's the situation we find ourselves in living on a boat. The obvious difference for us is that in DC, if you drop your wallet, keys, or phone on the lawn........pick it up. Do that in our watery world and it's a big problem.

Our dinghy is our car. We ferry groceries, boat part, supplies, and fuel to our boat in this way. High winds ? Big waves ? Still have to do it. No garage door opener here.

We had been having a run of good luck since we left the US in November of last year. Nothing irreplaceable had gone overboard; a few screwdrivers........a ratchet........a half-used propane bottle. Nothing too important until yesterday.

I'm downstairs unloading our recent grocery haul. Kirstin is on the stern of the boat securing the dinghy. "OH SHIT !!!!!" I'm always reluctant to respond when I hear that. Maybe if I just pretend that I didn't hear it, the problem will just go away. "OH NO !!!" OK, those two in sequence means "the ostrich method"of crisis management won't work.

Tom- "Anything wrong, sweetie ?"

Kirstin- "I just dropped the $&!@ing keys overboard"

Tom- "I thought the keychain was supposed to float"

Kirstin- "Remember, we never tested it"

Tom- "We should put that on our list of things to do"

Kirstin- "And it doesn't $&!@ing float"

Tom- "Hmmm"

So, Kirstin dons her wetsuit. Truth be told, it's kind of like lingerie so I'm not entirely hating the situation. She puts on her tank, jumps in the water.......and descends into the depths. Gotta like a chick who can "man up" like that. To make a long story shorter, we find the keys at about 35 feet .......although grocery shopping's coda added about 2 hours to our busy day. We did have spare keys for each of the three locks but we didn't want to lose that cute plastic flipper keychain.

Even though the incident would have been far simpler on kentucky bluegrass, we still love our environment.