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.