Miami to Marathon

We managed to pry ourselves out of Miami, despite threatening weather reports for the next evening. We sailed down the entire length of Biscayne Bay, south of Miami, to the entrance to Florida Bay at Jewfish Creek, a distance of 45 miles. With the threat of a cold front moving through and in need of warm showers, we tied up to a dock at the entrance to the Bay. A very funky and appropriate entrance to the Keys, with loud music, friendly people and pelicans watching us on the dock.

After a downpour most of the night, which we had no problem with at the dock, the weather unexpectedly cleared by mid-day the next day, so we took off and sailed down Key Largo on the bay side. After an hour of sailing we realized that we were going to pass an old favorite motel and breakfast place where we spent about 10 winters with our kids, so using our boat GPS and a car gps that Arnie got for his birthday, we first observed a car driving across Florida Bay with the gps telling us to turn onto land, but when we didn’t, it told us the mileage and direction to Popp’s motel. With that and our binoculars, we found Popp’s and called them for permission to use their dinghy dock. The owner is now the 24 year old who used to play with our son Ben of the same age and he was happy to let us come ashore. The next morning we ate at Harriet’s ( the best breakfast in the Keys) and visited with the people at Popp’s – it hasn’t change much in 20 years – still a neat place. We even think that we saw a very old Great White Heron named "Snowbird" who has lived at Popps since forever.

From there we sailed on further to the first place where a sailboat can cross to the Atlantic side, since the winds were now clocking so that the boat would be in the lee of the Keys. We anchored just past the Channel 5 bridge, with only 1 other boat in about a 3 mile diameter “bay”. No lights, just stars. The next day we got up early and sailed out into Hawk channel, the Atlantic side, but calm because of the reef a few miles off the shore. It was a nice sail – took us about 4 hours to sail 22 miles or so, and we entered the harbor of Marathon. We knew that it was crowded, but boy is it crowded! The city of Marathon really has cleaned up its act. 10 years ago Marathon was a hole, with derelict boats and sleezy surroundings. Three years ago, the city took out the derelict boats, put in a 226 mooring marina with all kinds of facilities, including showers, wi-fi, TV, dingy docks, bike racks ( always full) and more. Adjacent is a city park with tennis, basketball, bocci ball, and just a nice friendly setting, where everyone says hi. Amazing transformation. Unfortunately, with the weather so crazy this year, and the increased awareness of this great facility, the place is full. We are currently #17 on the waiting list for a mooring ball and nobody seems to be leaving, but are now at anchor in another part of the harbor. The anchorage is full too.

Met a bunch of good folks, including 2 other Corsair trimarans like ours, who we’ve corresponded with via e-mail but hadn’t met until now. Lots of other cool people traveling in all kinds of boats in all kinds of ways. Tonight is the Superbowl, so the lounge will probably be hopping. We plan on going over with some new friends. The weather has improved, but still remains strange, with continuously clocking winds and fronts moving through at lest once per week. Last night was a big thunderstorm that thankfully mostly missed us.

We’ll probably stay here another 10 days or so, and then start sailing back north to where we launched our boat, about 200 miles away. But for now, we are just hanging.

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.

Trailering South

Three of us made this trip, Ronnie, myself, and our son, Ben. And it took all three of us to make it successfully. We finally made it to Florida on Christmas Eve after waiting out a big snowstorm and having wheels fall off the trailer twice. A long strange trip.

Our first plan to visit my brother in Virginia was aborted when, with the refrigerator cleaned out and the heat turned down, we took a last minute look at the weather. The biggest snowstorm to hit the D.C. area in years was headed for northern Virginia. With no place to park the rig and little hope of getting it out before the Spring thaw, we decided to not go there and waited at home for the storm to develop.

It developed and then some. We finally abandoned hope of leaving until 4 days later, after the storm had passed and snow plows had had time to clean up the major roads. Good decision, because we lost a trailer wheel (1 of 4) at the 50 mile mark. It took 4 hours to repair, but the service guy tightened the bearing too much on the spare ( I told him that I thought that it was too tight but figured he knew more than I did). 40 miles later a friendly trucker pointed at our rig. We pulled over to find the bearing smoking and the dust cap blown off spraying grease everywhere. We tried to find a dustcap and regreased the wheel after loosening the bearing one notch, but the cap fell off again. We kept on going to South Jersey to visit an old friend late that night.

The next AM, after finding a source for both a new dustcap and a new tire and rim, we had gone all of 1/2 mile when the spare tire blew up. The blowout also destroyed the hub and blew the wheel off again. This time we rescued the wheel, but needed to call Boat U.S. again for help finding someone who would assist us on-site. Our boat is too tall to safely tow on a flatbed truck without taking wires or part of the boat out. 4 hours later we were back on the road again, totally paranoid about any odd sounds, smells, etc. That would continue for the rest of the trip. We made it past Washington, D.C. and into a badly plowed parking lot, where we proceeded to get 2 of the trailer tires locked around a hidden curb corner, with the truck on shear ice. An hour later, after hot water, shoveling and ultimately jacking up one of the axles we freed the trailer and went to sleep.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. We made up for lost time by driving 650 miles from D.C. to Georgia and then on to the Finish Line, a boat dealer friend of ours in Stuart, FL, where we unhitched the boat and continued to Ronnie's mom's house. A great Chinese Christmas dinner with relatives we haven't seen for a while, and we are now looking at launching the boat soon in Ft. Lauderdale to try to catch a weather window that might be appearing in about 3-4 days. Tune in about a week - hopefully for less eventful news.

Preparing for the trip South

We pulled the boat a little early this year to get it ready for the 3 month trip to the Bahamas. That meant bottom painting, cleaning and waxing the hulls and trying to unload Freebird as much as possible for the inevitable extra cruising weight she would have to carry. This boat was meant to sail light and fast, and we hate the extra weight needed for serious cruising - more water, gas, bigger dinghy and dinghy motor, extra anchor, etc. The weight doesn't affect top speed as much as it does acceleration and response to wind gusts, but that could be serious if overweighted. Anyway, she is probably a few hundred pounds more than we normally cruise at. We will just have to live with it.

This is what the rig looks like when we are all hitched up. We bought this 2004 Titan truck ( our first truck) just to pull the boat, and it does a good job of it. The overall length of truck and boat is over 50 feet - about the length of a semi. It's big. We get lots of comments - "is that an airplane?". Close. Our departure date is now 12/17/09.