Titusville - in a motel

 

The boat upwind of us only had one line to the forward cleat. If that line gave way, he would careen into Fleetwing. I added one line and the marina office added a third line. I think he’s secure now.

The highest winds are due tonight at Titusville.. Not wanting to experience that event, we decided to spend the night on land in a Days Inn. Last night was rough enough, we didn’t need to repeat that. So I decided to reserve a room and learned several lessons. First of all, never use a reservations service, only go directly to the official site of the motel you wish to deal with - do not use a third party like “reservation.com”. I thought I was using the Days Inn site, it was cleverly disguised to look like the real thing but I was wrong. I found out that reservations.com charges $19.95 to make a reservation. If you dealt directly with Days Inn, there was no charge. Furthermore, any reservations through them are completely non-refundable, including the $19.95 booking fee. 

Several boats usually out on moorings or anchored, came into the marina looking for free dockage by the public boat ramp. 

My second bad experience was with a long time favorite of mine, Red Roof Inn. Usually, you have until 4:00 pm of the day of the reservation to cancel - but not at Red Roof Inn in Orlando. That inn has a 48 hour advanced notice requirement for cancellations. It was in the fine print at the bottom of the confirmation form that I finally read after being informed from my phone call to cancel. With all the charges and  non refundable cancellations, the room wound up costing 2x the normal rate. Lesson learned, hopefully you’ll pay attention closely when reserving a room yourself.

Meanwhile, we were okay last night - bouncy of we both slept well. Wednesday night would be a different story with winds increasing as Nicole approached landfall. So we took a room on land and plant do return to Fleetwing on Thursday late morning. Everything is double and triple tied off as best we could. 

Despite the storm, there will always be a few that stay on their boats. Forrest is one such individual, he’ll  look after Fleetwing between gusts of wind. On Friday, we plan on having Fleetwing hauled to replace a through hull that’s leaking. Then it’s time to get ready to leave Fleetwing while we go north for the holidays but this year at least we have our own car for the trip north. 

We’re relaxing in motel room hoping all is fine with Fleetwing in the morning.