January 17 - 25 MOVING AT LAST

Coconut Van in Key West



Parting Shot of Friendly Strangers at No Name Harbor -- I love these bikes!


Jan 17 We got the final parts installed and paid off the diesel mechanic. We’re fairly satisfied with their work and VERY happy to have the engine running again. For our last day in No Name Harbor we took 2 bike trips (we each did one) to get supplies. Had a celebratory lunch at Boater’s Grill in the harbor. Dinghied around to say goodby to people on boats that we had gotten friendly with. Then after dinner on our boat we went ashore to dance one more dance at Boater’s Grill, to lively Cuban music, and buy a flan and Cuban coffee to take back and savor for dessert!

After two full days of sailing we arrived in Marathon in the middle of the Florida Keys. The accommodations for cruisers there are legendary, as they have moorings (rare down here), tennis courts, laundry facilities, weekly potluck dinners, seminars for cruisers who are planning to go to the Bahamas, etc.

We have met up with our Canadian and Mattapoisett friends and there are also several boats here from Scituate, and maybe another 10 from other Massachusetts towns. We arrived about the same time as another Tayana 37, TRANQUILITY, from Block Island, RI.

We watched the inauguration of President Obama at the Marathon Marina with about 80 other cruisers. Lots of applause from the cruising group!

Jan 24 There are many helpful facilities near the marina in Marathon but it seemed that there was not the contact with nature we have had at other stops. So we took our dinghy and a couple of our friends and traveled down the fairly shallow Sister River that leads south out of the harbor. We were in company with some kayakers and canoeists and many birds. Where the river joins the ocean we beached the dinghy and walked along a nice beach, one with many tiny shells and tiny bits of coral. We watched a wedding set up in the park near the beach, and then sat on a side beach that faced the river and enjoyed the beer and snacks we had brought. A nice break from the bustling mooring field in the harbor.

Our batteries are staying topped up thanks to getting a last-day charge from a borrowed generator in No Name Harbor and to the new solar panels that are working very well. This mundane fact is actually very important to us and allows us to not have to pay the bigger rates to stay at a marina and charge up there.

There aren’t as many Spanish/Cuban-speakers here in this part of the Keys. There are several government properties with tall radio towers. We are speculating that this is a monitoring area for illegal immigrants. Marathon has it’s own “Bridge to Nowhere”, one we hailed to get opened to enter the harbor, but we can see that is blocked from any traffic. The key on the other side does not appear to have any, or at least not many, buildings. We heard that there is a political reason for the city to maintain the bridge and employ a bridge tender on a bridge no one seems to use.

We took a bus to Key West, about 50 miles, and walked around there for a good part of the day on Sunday. There are still some sailors left from Race Week which ended on Friday and there was a Disney cruise ship in at the dock so those passengers were out and about along with us. There are definitely a few characters out there also. Of course we had to have a slice of Key Lime Pie before we left.

The weather in Marathon has been cooler -- I know, not bitter cold and miserable like in New England -- but it is comfortable and there are no bugs at this time of year. We are still evaluating our options for the Bahamas. Stay Tuned!!

JANUARY 11 - 16 ONE MORE WEEK IN NO NAME HARBOR

Various scenes from January in Key Biscayne

January 11 Time for puttering, reflection and mini-exploring: that’s what you expect to have time for as a retired and cruising couple, right?

Discoveries:

Miami cyclists, hundreds of them, are using the Rickenbacker Bridge to Key Biscayne on Saturday (the east-bound side of the bridge is closed to traffic) and they are stopping for water, OJ or Gatorade at the outdoor breakfast place we are at.

There are still lots of paths to explore with my bike; on one trip I was invited to join a “Biking and History of Key Biscayne” group (this one was a corporate group) as they peddled through the State Park.

The Park has prison vans and high school students in buses that come to help keep the place clean. (They seem to keep these groups on opposite sides of the park!)

We are enjoying the Cuban food -- this week it was the small round beef snack pastries -- and the Cuban coffee.

Dolphins still come through every once in a while and when one catches a fish it seems to come to the surface to show it off.

It’s fun to walk to the beach, buy an ice-cream cone (we have no freezer on the boat), and make a phone call home.

When you buy solar panels the sun stops shining! Before Monday, when we went to Miami to buy solar panels from a low-cost warehouse there, we had constant sunshine. Since then, it’s been cloudy half or more of the day.

You can live pretty well without power on the boat. Without the engine we have no batteries and we have to keep what is left in the batteries for the fridge. The solar panels will keep them charged enough to run the fridge. So we have used a crank-power radio, an oil lamp and flashlights, our Sunshower to heat water for showers, and our propane stove to heat water for dishes, etc. The Park provides a washer and dryer and restrooms. While we’re at the restroom pavillion we plug in our phones and laptop there to keep them charged.

We’re motivated to be able to read and understand some Spanish. We bought a Spanish/English dictionary in Miami. We’re asking lots of questions.

Jan. 14 This is the day the mechanics brought our parts back and re-installed them. Barry and Susan came back from other parts of Biscayne Bay and helped us to move the boat to the seawall. However, there is still one part that hasn’t yet been rebuilt (Ken was mad!) and in the end it is taking until the 16th to get the engine completely back to working order and with several parts new or rebuilt.

Plans for the future are to probably catch up with Barry and Susan and also with Addison and Pat in Marathon (in the Florida Keys). Some advice we have gotten is to wait for the “winter” weather, long periods of northerlies, to end before heading for the Bahamas. We have never been to the Keys west of Marathon, including Key West, so that would be an interesting destination.

PS Justin got back to Louisiana at Fort Polk this week, 13 months spent in Baghdad and almost 5 years spent in the Army. Thanks, Justin, for doing your part in our country’s defense. For the future there are plans to ski in New England, then ski in Argentina in their winter (June & July), then start grad school in public lands management.

JANUARY 2 - JANUARY 10 LAYOVER ON A TROPICAL ISLE (AND A $2 BUS RIDE FROM MIAMI)

Three views of No Name Harbor, Key Biscayne

Jan 2 After 2 nights in lovely Hurricane Harbor in the middle of Key Biscayne (a small key, about a 35 minute bike ride from end to end), we moved to No Name Harbor on the southern end of the island. At No Name we would be in a State Park with restrooms, a self-serve pumpout station, bike trails, and two small restaurants. At Hurricane Harbor we had no landing spot to leave our dinghy, only a small bridge to drop someone off at. The homes around the harbor were beautiful and sunsets were magnificent.

Our first night in No Name Harbor we decided to take advantage of the restaurant right at the head of the harbor, Boater’s Grill. There was live music, the food was excellent, most of the patrons were Spanish-speaking, and before we left we joined half of the diners and all of the wait staff in dancing and a conga line.

Most of the tables at Boater’s Grill are on a porch so music wafts across the small harbor. The next day, Mariachi music started in the late afternoon. Meanwhile we had called our daughter Tammy in Santa Fe to find out the Spanish vocabulary we would need to politely get our waiter’s attention next time (although they all spoke English as well as Spanish).

Jan. 5 While running the engine at idle on Sunday afternoon it suddenly started acting erratically and then died. Ken worked on it and decided that if we could get the parts, we should replace the ancient fuel pump and while we were at it we should also get a new alternator. He called around on Monday morning and found a Perkins engine dealer in NW Miami. By 11 am we were on a bus to Miami and then metro-railed and bused some more to the location. We got the parts and lugged them back, reversing our morning trip and successfully returned at about 5:30 pm. Of course we needed some sustenance then so stopped at Boater’s Grill for sangria.

The next day Ken installed the parts, but there was still no response from the engine. And because of running our lights, refrigerator and trying to start the engine, the batteries were getting dangerously low. To make a long story short Ken got a promise from a local mechanic to come on Thursday morning to look at the engine and borrowed a generator from a boat in the harbor to help get the batteries back to partial power.

Barry and Susan on SWAN came back to see us in No Name Harbor. They promised to stay until they could help us move our engine-less boat to the seawall in the harbor where the mechanic asked us to have the boat. Moving RISING TIDE caused the highlight of the week -- getting caught in a squall while just reaching a curved part of the seawall and having to tie-off quickly in a shallow area there. The curve of the concrete wall and the shallowness caused us to tip dangerously as the tide went out and the boat hull leaned toward the concrete. We had every fender possible on the seawall side of the boat, and we had an anchor pulling us (hopefully) away from the wall as the tide continued to go out. On top of this drama, another boat in the anchorage started dragging anchor in the squall and the occupants were down below and didn’t realize what was happening. Susan noticed first and Barry took up the call to alert the crew (four French Canadians). All four Canadians were soon yelling in French as all four of us were yelling in English and their boat was about to hit the seawall about 40 ft. from our boat. We got their fenders and lines tied on pretty quickly and they only suffered a few scrapes; it could have been worse!

Jan. 8 At 5:45 am, about an hour and a half before sunrise, we got up to reposition RISING TIDE now that the tide had come in. Miraculously out of the dark came a rowboat with Barry and Susan. They made easy work of getting us back to deeper water along the wall.

Later in the day, the mechanics gone and the engine several parts lighter as they found what needed rebuilding and cleaning, we again quietly moved RISING TIDE back to be on anchor near the mangroves on the other side of the harbor. Again we were helped by our associate crew Barry and Susan. They then sailed out on their quest to find a source of cooking heat -- propane -- back on the mainland.

Even though we are most likely going to be waiting almost another week for the parts to be reinstalled we are lucky to be where we are. The weather has been perfect every day (except for the squall) and we are within biking distance of most supplies we need. This town has an interesting mix of Floridians, Cuban-Americans, tourists from all over the world, boaters, displaced New Englanders, and tennis players (the tennis center here is the site of the fifth largest professional tennis tournament in the world, although in fact checking this I see that the Sony Erickson Tournament which is supposed to be the one held here is now held in Qatar). The ocean beach was voted in the top 10 in the country. From our anchor we can see large iguanas, manatees, dolphins chasing fish, ibises.

Jan. 10 Today we received a phone call from Justin in Germany (he is on his way home -- yay!!) as we biked to breakfast on the other side of town and joined almost 100 bicycle riders who were using the outdoor restaurant as a pit stop on a Saturday morning ride. Ken had rented a mountain bike the day before at the State Park and they nicely let him keep it for 24 hours (not just the one day that you usually get with a rental). We had gone on a bicycle exploration yesterday on the other end of Key Biscayne and onto the next key, Virginia Key.

This week has been a roller-coaster but it has been made reasonably comfortable by friends, location and weather. We may even be traveling to Miami again on Monday to use up some of our layover time!

December 27 - Jan 1 WARM THOUGHTS FOR OUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Leaving the dock in N. Palm Beach, AQUILA in background -- another Tayana 37

Christmas Key Biscayne-style


Dec. 27 Cell phones are wonderful and are worth every penny of that monthly bill as we travel. We may not be as connected when we get to the Bahamas so we are appreciating our contacts we can make now. For those of you we have been in touch with lately, we want to reiterate how nice it has been to hear your voices. Hopefully we’ll get to some additional calls this next week. We also use our phones to call ahead to marinas and other resources in new places. We are still feeling our way around -- almost like a blind person -- in all these new places, so extra contact information from shore side locations in helpful.

In Pompano Beach this week we met up with an old friend of mine from Boston University. Digna, who now works at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, drove with her sister to a bridge in Pompano Beach that neither of us was familiar with and by using our phones we got connected and then took our dinghy about ¼ mile to where RISING TIDE was anchored. Digna did play around with me for a bit at the bridge, telling me she could see me in the channel but not telling me exactly which bank she was on or which side of the bridge. She had me going in circles! We had a great visit.

Dec. 28 After spending one night on anchor in a channel on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale we then spent two nights in Lake Sylvia (my sister’s family, the Sylvias in Rochester, should go there) in a more central Fort Lauderdale location. We took other channels to get to restaurants and grocery stores by boat. We did some walking too, but the trips down channels and under low bridges was different. Ken collected some trash in one channel since we knew there was a dumpster at the end we could put it in. We were told later that there is a regular cleaning schedule for the city waters and a special boat with a paddle-wheel-type arrangement to collect debris.

The coconuts fall in the channels and fool us as they look like balls or floating trap buoys. We had fun watching large iguanas that hang out on many of the docks and lawns close to the channels. Some are green and some are orange or grey. There were different sizes but some were more than 2 feet long. There are also parrots here -- noisy especially when many of them are in the same tree.

Fort Lauderdale is not just a place for wildlife; we saw so many private yachts, of the size that they would need crew, and also many businesses that cater to private yachts, selling uniforms, food, equipment, arranging employment, etc. A monthly newspaper with about 60 pages reports on news for captains and crews.

Dec. 30 We are enjoying wonderful weather, warmer than usual for this time of year, and almost no rain. Although we haven’t been to any beaches yet or been swimming, we are loving it. We left Lake Sylvia and sailed outside in the ocean to Miami, in pretty decent wind and very little chop. It took most of the day and we ended up in an area called Marine Stadium, facing the Miami skyline. This area has been used for waterskiing shows; there is a large grandstand and a long oval-shaped stadium. Jet skis and waterskiers still use the outside perimeter leaving plenty of room for anchoring in the middle. SWAN with Barry and Susan are here too and for New Year’s Eve we enjoyed dinner together and then watched fireworks at midnight over Miami!

The water is a turquoise color here and I went swimming to check the hull of RISING TIDE (we hit something coming in to Miami in the entrance channel). The hull looked OK and I enjoyed the clear, warm water. We also picked up mail here, at Key Biscayne, a bike-ride away over a bridge.

Our next few days will be spent in Hurricane Harbor, Key Biscayne. There are two large parks to explore and it is a good spot for getting more information about the Bahamas trip since we are now less than 50 miles from Bimini or Cat Cay.