To Miami

Hi all,

It’s been a while since we’ve updated the blog – couple of weeks due to travel mostly. Arnie had to fly home to Boston for 4 days, while Ronnie took shore leave visiting her Mom in nearby Boynton Beach. When we came back there was another possible weather window appearing on the horizon, so we decided to wait it out one more time.

In the meantime, we rented a car and went to the west coast of Florida, Naples and Cape Coral, to see 2 boats that were for sale. Both very nice boats, both too much money, but it was fun to look. Also gave us a lot to talk about and whether a bigger boat was really in the cards. Still trying to figure that out.

Naples is very pretty, at least the old downtown area and beach, with its long pier. Along Alligator alley going across the state, we finally saw tons of birds, alligators and what the old swamp used to look like. The first boat we saw was designed by a famous multihull designer, John Shuttleworth, and built by a reputable builder in FL. Nice boat, a little worrisome when we saw 4 autopilots and the helm felt really heavy. Also too much money.

We headed up to Cape Coral after Naples to see the next boat, a Catana 41, a fast French boat that was sitting in a neat old boatyard that is exclusively for catamarans. The owner was there to show us around and he obviously loves his boat, but can’t sail it anymore. Unfortunately it is too much boat for our needs with a scary number of systems – including 2 diesel engines - and too much money.

We came back to see that the weather window was once again messing up. We could probably make the crossing, but then more than likely get stuck somewhere en route to Marsh Harbour ( 200 miles from Florida). Given that we already have been waiting a month and we want to go have some fun, we decided to go south to the Keys via Miami and then the Gulf (shallow) side of the Keys where there are lots of islands and not many boats.

We sailed south from Ft. Lauderdale to Miami after almost a month being there on a nice Easterly wind. We biked around Miami and met up with some friends from the Bahamas. Today was my birthday and the other cruisers anchored near us had sort of a party on their boat for all of us.


Just decided to show a bunch of pictures for the rest of this blog – more fun. Tune in next week, we are headed for Marathon, about 2/3 down the chain.

Almost Like Florida

Well, we are still on a mooring in Fort Lauderdale, but the weather is no longer cold. It’s gone from ridiculously cold to cool to warm and rainy and windy. Kind of like normal Florida. But the winds are still clocking around like a whirling dervish, still not yielding any weather window longer than 1/2 day. And by now, Sunday, Arnie is readying himself to fly back to Boston for a few days - to vote, among other things. When he returns on Friday, we’ll have a big pow-wow to decide whether another attempt to sail the 200 miles to the Abacos is in the cards.

In the meantime, we have been keeping ourselves busy, having fun with the people we have met, who have also been stuck here. We have especially hung out with a couple from Canada who are crewing aboard a large catamaran – they left 2 days ago for parts further south. Our other buddy is an Australian sailor ( 200 ton master license) who bought a boat in Baltimore and is sailing it back to Australia mostly by himself after doing a walk-about of sorts to Cuba, the Caribbean, then through the Panama Canal and beyond. He’s been stuck by weather and waiting for documents from Australia, which he just got yesterday for his boat.

We went out twice to a nice jazz place with live music and cheap beers, and basically had a good time dancing and such. It was warm enough daytime that Ronnie even broke out her drawing materials and drew our “neighborhood” from our cockpit – drawbridge, boats, water and buildings. Pretty busy place.

On Wednesday, having heard from another boat like ours, Cheekee Monkee, waiting for “our bridge” to open, we sailed out for the day with our friends to watch the beginning of the Ft. Lauderdale to Key West race. It was a beautiful day with calm seas and winds, and we had a great time sailing again with good company. Cheekee Monkee came in second to another of our trimaran species who won.

The next day it warmed up enough that even the lizards reappeared, sunning themselves to come out of their hibernation. There have been lots of reports of iguanas ( an invasive species down here – the locals consider them pests) dropping out of trees and drowning, because they “freeze” at 40 degrees after a couple of days. This, as you may have heard has been the longest, coldest spell Florida has had in over a decade. And we were here to witness it!

We are now considering our major task for the day – clothes washing – so we will have clean ones to wherever we go when we return. Tomorrow’s entertainment will be to look at an all together too big catamaran that’s for sale to see what we are missing. Actually this is part of an ongoing debate about what we want to do with boats when we grow up. Tune in next week.

Keeping Warm!

No pictures this week. It was either too cold to be outside or raining, so we spent the week trying to stay warm and have as much fun as possible. Ft. Lauderdale really is a nice place for a city - it's just been amazingly cold for Florida - near freezing in the AM and up to all of low 50's or less during the day. And it's been blowing constantly from the NW which is a really cold wind. I know that the rest of the country is a lot colder, but it's not much fun waking up on a 41 degree boat, putting all of our clothes on ( not enough for this kind of cold) and then dingying across the waterway to take a hot shower - Thank goodness for them.

Then it's on to the event to keep us off the boat for the day so we don't freeze. We've seen 2 good movies - "Up in the Air" and "Avatar". We had one day of nice weather, so we biked around town again. We've discovered a dynamite Italian bakery on Las Olas boulevard, so we bike 2 miles each way to get bread and pastry when the weather allows.

In the evening, the cruisers also stuck here gather for either drinks or even a pot luck dinner. Good group of people - international in scope - from Australia to Quebec to France and Germany. Even us. Nice folks out cruising for months to years, most planning to go to the Bahamas - not possible in these conditions - one heading back to Australia.

The weather is supposed to break some time this week - hoping for sooner rather than later. Our plan, given the weather and the fact that Arnie has to return to Boston in about a week is to stay here for about 10 days, with Ronnie visiting her Mom when Arnie is in Boston. Then when Arnie returns, there is an outside chance, pending weather, of trying again to make the passage to the Bahamas. If not, then we'll probably head down to the Keys and Miami.

Tune in next week.

Arnie and Ronnie

Mother Nature Wins Again

Things were looking a bit better after resting up for a few days at Ronnie’s Mom’s house, so with our son, Ben, Ronnie and I drove back to where we had left the boat, hitched and locked it up to the truck, and as we were pulling it out of the yard a big bump caused the boat and trailer to unhitch and slide across the road. Ben and I jumped out, grabbed 2 jacks to jack up the trailer ( the plastic trailer wheel was no longer functional nor round from grinding along the pavement) , and we managed to hook up the boat and trailer to the truck again. Without further incident we drove to the ramp about 2 miles away. Several hours later, after loading the boat up with enough food to last several trips, we successfully launched Freebird in Manatee Pocket in Stuart, FL.

Ronnie and I spent the rest of the day and all of the next putting things in place. At 11:30 AM on the 2nd day we attached the mainsail and discovered that chipmunk(s) had spent the Fall in our sail eating 9 holes varying from about 1” to 5” throughout the central part of it. After several minutes of dismay, I managed to find a sail loft in Stuart (Mack Sails if anybody ever needs a good sailmaker), and by 5:30 that same day, they had sewn patches to fix the sail and we reattached the mainsail. We left the next morning headed for Lake Worth in West Palm Beach, about 30 miles away. The weatherman had forecast bad conditions until that day, when things were supposed to calm down and the wind was supposed to clock in our favor from the Southwest. We kept on monitoring the weather constantly, since it determines everything about the passage across the Gulfstream.

All signs told us that if we had any weather window at all, it would happen on December 31 or not for quite a while, since a major cold front was moving through the next afternoon. But no one agreed on exactly everything. That night we gave up trying to interpret graphs and predictions, deciding to “stick our nose out” into the Atlantic before dawn the next day and we would decide then what we did.

We went out at 6:30 AM the next day to find moderate winds coming out of the SE not the SW. Since we basically had to go SE that was bad. Making it worse, the seas had not settled down from the fairly high winds from the East previously, being in the 5 foot range. We tried everything we knew, first reefed, then full sail, then motorsailing, but we couldn’t achieve much better than about 3.5- 4 knots of speed. At that rate it would take us 16 hours to get to West End, about 55 miles away. We decided to turn back, and as soon as we did our speed immediately jumped to 11 knots, occasionally surfing at 15+ ( our boat’s personal best).

And then, just to tease us, the wind clocked to the SW. But it also dropped in speed to less than 10 knots (from about 15). So we turned around again and headed for the Bahamas, but with the reduced wind and the still head-on waves, we could only reach 3 knots of speed. Ok, this time we meant it when we turned around and went back in. We got back to Lake Worth 4 hours after leaving, worn out.

After vegetating for the rest of the entire day on the boat, we decided that this trip to the Bahamas was not meant to be. Even if we wanted to try again, the winds were about to kick up the next day and turn to the North (deadly on the Gulfstream, since it runs to the North and causes huge waves) for the next week. So we decided to go to Plan B. We decided to head south to a nice mooring field in the middle of Ft. Lauderdale run by the city. From there Arnie would fly back to Boston for a few days towards the end of January, and then we would head for Miami and maybe the Keys for a while before heading back North to Stuart and home. Not the Bahamas by a long shot, but not too bad either.

So as we were slogging our way through dozens of bridge openings along the ICW going south, we were approaching the only inlet to the ocean, as the inlet bridge opened, the tide was high and the winds were out of the NW. All of that spelled “Get out of the ICW and go sailing”, so we did. The Atlantic never looked so good. It was flat and we sailed the remaining 10 miles to the Ft. Lauderdale inlet (Port Everglades) in short order under sail, not motor. As we got close to the mooring field (with a total of only 10 moorings), we managed to get the last one, beating out another boat by 5 minutes according to the dockmaster. Hopefully, our luck has changed. Today, we bicycled around Ft. Lauderdale and had a great time. We are right on Las Olas Blvd. Sort of the artiest, nicest part of town, and we plan on enjoying it.