More Miami

Pictures: Ken in our small kayak that we carry onboard, tooting around No Name Harbor, Key Biscayne; Florida Lighthouse, Bill Baggs State Park, also where No Name Harbor is; outside the German Pub on Lincoln St. in Miami Beach where we watched the Patriots playoff game (interesting that they face some of the TVs to the outside tables); Pete and Eri Mico on the flying bridge of RISING TIDE; Coconut Grove street scene, with sailors returning their boats via sidewalk. There is an Olympic Training Center for sailing in CG.

We finished up our time in Key Largo by biking to John Pennecamp State Park. We snorkeled there and checked out the hiking trails. And then we headed back up to Coconut Grove and got in good position to pick up our son Pete and his girlfriend Eri for their visit starting on January 19^th (Pete’s birthday).

We’ve been in the Miami area for so long we’ll be the ones giving advice on where to go and what to do!  We have found the best hardware store (Shell Lumber), the best gelato (some Argentine place), the best bike trails (Bill Baggs State Park), and lots of other bests!  The hardware store owner took us under his wing and we got invited on a boat ride up the Miami River, right down the middle of the city, at night so we could see the buildings all lit up. We had dinner in the city and then screamed back over the black water as only a local could do.

We had a shared dinner with the Mahoneys (from Hull) at the Coconut Grove condo they are condo-sitting at this week. Our friends from KIANDA joined us. We also had a picnic supper on the lawn at The Barnacle and the Mahoneys joined us for the live music there. Before our Massachusetts guests arrived we installed another solar panel and got caught up on laundry and grocery shopping.

Pete and Eri had great weather for their visit. The slightly chilly weather we had been having became warmer and it was clear and sunny every day. Some highlights of our time together:

--A birthday celebration with gelato on their first night here

--A trip across Biscayne Bay and a stop at a sandbar to wade around and look for sealife

--Dinner at the Boaters Grill in our Key Biscayne anchorage, serenaded at our table with live accordion and violin music (it was good!), sharing a whole large fried Red Snapper and dancing

--Snorkeling and sunbathing on the beach at Bill Baggs State Park

--Getting Pete and Eri on our folding bikes for a ride to tour the lighthouse at the park

--Seeing some wildlife, including loggerhead turtles off of Key Biscayne and fish swarming and jumping in the entrance to Miami harbor

--Eri helped us find Lincoln Rd. in Miami Beach (a closed-off-street pedestrian mall of gigantic Miami proportions) where we watched the Patriots win their way to the Superbowl (!!) and had dinner at one of the sidewalk cafes

We said good-by to Pete and Eri yesterday as they climbed into a cab in North Miami (after a short boat trip north to show them some of the ICW in the area). We had said good-by to Dave and Jessica on KIANDA the day before, as they are heading to the Bahamas. The Mahoneys are done their condo-sitting stint and will move on to other areas of Florida. So now we are back on our own. It’s a little quiet.  Not boring, however, as we seem to have a problem with our transmission that has cropped up in the late afternoon yesterday. Stay tuned; our fingers are crossed as we hope it is a minor problem with an easy solution!

Quiet Time

Pictures: Everything has to come by boat including your own portable domino table, Boca Chita in Biscayne National Park; view from the top of the lighthouse on Boca Chita; Peter and Diane Mahoney visiting us in Key Largo; the lawn and extra comfy chairs at the Barnacle in Coconut Grove; Dwayne Wade on the Metromover in Miami

The past week or so (we should call it a “blog time”) has been peaceful and uneventful. Our weather  has been sunny, with calm winds, and flat seas. But we’ll try and remember some activities that are worth reporting!

We started this time with replacing some underwater zincs that we need to keep maintained. There is one on the propeller shaft and one on the hull. The water temps in Coconut Grove were warm, and Ken was able to make a few dives in shallow water and attach them.  Also while in “The Grove” we visited Ralph Munroe’s house, built in the late 1880s and now a state park. Ralph was a boat designer from the Northeast but spent a lot of time in the Biscayne Bay area in the winter, back when there wasn’t much there but a rooming house and a post office. The park has the most comfortable chairs we’ve ever sat in, set up on a beautiful lawn looking out into the bay. We learned that there were fresh water springs in the bay until Florida decided to start draining the Everglades.

After two nights back at No Name Harbor in Key Biscayne, and a bus trip to Miami, we have mostly been in Biscayne Bay National Park, stopping at islands that are 7-10 miles apart. So that means not using too much fuel, but running the engine enough to heat water for showers.  At Boca Chita we joined a crowd of mostly families on a Friday night, camping, playing music, setting up domino tables and and running generators. We met two women from Key Biscayne who came out to camp and who knew a lot of the history of the area. This island reminded us of Bumpkin Island back in Boston Harbor.

The next night we stopped at Elliot Key Harbor. It was shallow and we couldn’t get into the harbor with our boat, so we anchored a ways outside and took our dinghy in. It was just as well that we weren’t staying as there were more families and more Cuban music. Fun to watch for a while but we were in the mood for a quiet evening.

One more day and night in the National Park, on an Angelfish Creek side channel, convinced us that we were ready for more company. It was too peaceful! We did have the diversion of catching a Spanish Mackerel in the bay this day; and four Florida Environmental Police boats buzzed us repeatedly, looking for a fishing boat that had gotten out of control and rammed into the mangroves somewhere in one of the side channels. (The fishing boat was finally found and an injured fisherman was airlifted out by helicopter.) But other than that and an awesome kayak route we found in one of the smaller channels, it was time for civilization. We needed food, water for our tanks and gasoline for our outboard, so we set off for Key Largo.

So right now we are anchored in a protected harbor on the west side (bayside) of Key Largo; it’s called Tarpon Basin. Key Largo is the first key you get to when driving from Miami to The Keys. There are about 8-10 liveaboard boats here—boats that probably don’t leave the basin much—and about the same number of cruisers like us. There’s a town dock and a park with a community center on shore. Plus we have a shopping center and lots of souvenir shops and diving companies in this area. We had a visit yesterday from Peter Mahoney, a lobsterman from Hull that we know, and his wife Diane. They brought the lobsterboat down south last winter but this year decided to drive.  

Happy New Year 2012

Pictures: Tammy and Heidi in our cockpit; Jessica, Ken and Dave on New Year's Eve; motorcycle visitors to Dania Beach; Tammy and Little Havana regular (He offered us $20 if we could stump him on state capitols, presidents and dates, or World Series winners in the last 80 years. We couldn't!); our view of Coconut Grove, with spoil islands on the left and right

It seems like a good omen to be celebrating the new year in warm waters, watching the fireworks over Miami and the Chinese candle lanterns over our anchorage in Coconut Grove! I’m not sure how they do it but the candles floated up over the harbor and into the night sky before extinguishing. At the same time the half-moon was setting down over the skyline of high-rise buildings. We cooked a dinner on our boat for ourselves and Jessica and Dave from KIANDA. They brought a great potato salad, a salmon appetizer and champagne for midnight. We both contributed desserts so we ate well!

We’ve had a great holiday week, good weather and a visit from Tammy for 5 days starting on Christmas Eve. With Tammy we hopped around from Dania Beach to Miami Beach to Key Biscayne and back. Tammy likes the beach and bicycling and we did both, as well as swimming off the boat on one hot day. Tammy also speaks very good Spanish so on a side trip, by bus, to Little Havana in Miami she was an interpreter.

While in Key Biscayne we met Tammy’s boyfriend Mike Mangan, his mom and step-dad. They drove down from the Orlando area where Mike was visiting. We had a good time getting to know them, taking them out for a boat ride in Biscayne Bay and serving barbequed shrimp and steak kabobs before they left.

After Tammy left it was a little too quiet and lonely but the next day we moved back to Oleta River State Park and caught up on end-of-year paperwork, read our mail (that was delivered by Tammy), and set up our next plans. We had never been to Coconut Grove and KIANDA was here waiting for a mechanic to help them with an engine problem. We decided that they could use moral support. This is a section of Miami – in fact Miami City Hall is right here on the waterfront in a building Pan-Am Airlines used to use as a terminal for a major seaplane operation. There are many restaurants, shops and parks. As we arrived we saw the last small boats being towed in after a week-long regatta for youth sailors from 23 countries! Just the kind of place we could explore and enjoy for a couple of days.

Our anchorage is outside of the mooring area, near a spoil island. The spoil islands are places where they have dredged and left the material (sand in this case) as a new island. These have been here for a while and have palm trees, bushes and grasses on them. Signs on them indicate that they have been recently cleaned up and are being incorporated into the harbor as recreation areas.

We will hang around Miami and Biscayne Bay for a while; our son Pete will be visiting in about two weeks with his girlfriend. We don’t mind cycling from one resort town to another and then to a National Park!

Tying up loose ends: a website for the Thanksgiving Dinner at St. Mary’s Georgia is at http://cutterloose.com/?p=2049   Ken is standing in the foreground of the picture of the buffet table with all the food (click on the pic if you don’t see him); Heidi is sitting in the background of the second picture of people eating.

South Florida Vibes

Pictures: the beach at Oleta River State Park, North Miami, with bilingual signage; Heidi and Digna Meija in Boca Raton; flowers blooming in Stuart (I have no idea what they are but they were pretty); kayaking in the mangroves at Oleta River

They are trying to keep some of the natural wonder in Florida – the slogan for the State Parks is “the Real Florida”. It is working, to some extent. We are anchored right now in a bay just a quarter mile from the Intracoastal Waterway where there are mangroves three-quarter of the way around us. Ken is catching small fish and we are watching other thinner fish jumping clear out of the water.  This is the Oleta River State Park, Florida’s “largest urban park”. Just behind the mangroves rise a row of 25 or 30 story buildings. Last night we were visited by a huge Met Life blimp, the third different blimp we’ve seen this week. They must have a schedule so the blimps don’t bump into each other!

So we have alternately busy days and quiet days. It depends on the day of the week, as weekend days are busy everywhere you go here. And it depends on where we choose to anchor.

In Fort Lauderdale we anchored in Lake Sylvia. We have been here before and we know it is out of the wind and good holding ground. When we arrived it was very full of anchored boats. We were on the far side, close to shore because of the lack of anchoring room. We headed out to a favorite “watering hole”, a bar called the Southport. However, our dinghy route in the canal system was blocked by police boats. We tied up to a city dock about three blocks from the Southport and found that there was a car in the canal near the city dock with a body in it.  (The next day the paper reported that it was a 52 year old man and the car was a white Mercedes convertible. No other information about how it got there.)

The following day a woman came out onto the back lawn of her large house on the edge of Lake Sylvia and asked us to move. She was having guests later in the day and we evidently were not something she wanted her friends to have to see! No use in making an issue out of it; we moved. Anyway, most of the boats that were here the day before had left, probably because it is good weather to cross to the Bahamas.

On our third night in Lake Sylvia we had a car alarm or house alarm going off almost the entire night. It’s time to leave!

In the past ten days we have visited with several friends. We stopped in Stuart, which is near Rio where we were in our last blog. We called Tom Coleman, a Marblehead friend who now has homes in the Stuart area and Newburyport. He also has a boat in Florida. We had a good time catching up on his news. Stuart also has a very nice marina with inexpensive moorings for rent and very clean showers and a laundry. The city is quite interesting; we will try and stop there and stay a little longer on our way back.

We visited with Olga Nohe in Delray Beach. She picked us up near where we had anchored and took us to her house. She and Brian moved there 10 years ago from Cohasset. We had a great visit and enjoyed hearing about the Nohe "children" and getting an update on the new headphone business Brian is involved in, working with ”50 Cent”, the rapper.  The next day, in Boca Raton, I biked to Florida Atlantic University where Digna Meija, a former co-worker at Boston University, now works. She showed me around the Engineering Dept. and we got caught up on what’s been happening since we saw her three years ago.

In Lake Sylvia we found Jessica and Dave, new friends that we last saw just before Halloween when we were all in Chesapeake City and heading south. It was good to see them and find out how they have been. They are from New Brunswick and this is their first trip down the East Coast.

We expect to stay in the mangroves and quiet state parks as long as we can before we head back towards Ft. Lauderdale to meet Tammywhen she flies in there and has a five-day visit with us. We have our kayak off the top deck and have used it every day.  There is a rental place here for bikes and kayaks so we find their orange kayaks circling our bay off and on. There are canals and small rivers to explore, and a university campus on the next peninsula has bike trails and nature trails. The state park beach is beautiful and the water here is aqua-colored. We’ll be visiting Miami with Tammy; it’s just 10 miles from where we are now. Of course there are the South Beach and Little Havana highlights to catch, but we also hope to get to the Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne to balance out the city with the “Real Florida”!

Slowing Down the Pace

Pictures: Ken's new bike, in front of the Vero Beach City Marina showers/laundry/lounge building; our neighbor in Rio, a great blue heron looking pale in the flash; our boat at the Rio dock; kids playing in the surf at Vero Beach (Christmas can't seem to come soon enough down here -- they began playing Christmas music on the radio before Thanksgiving)

We have spent the past 10 days mainly in two places: Vero Beach, on the Florida coast, and the Rio section of Jensen Beach, on the St. Lucie River. This is so different from the schedule we had in getting to mid-coast Florida where we would be in 8 different places in 10 days and at first it seems that we are slacking. But no, we are in warm, mild weather and we don’t have to be anywhere at any particular time in the next few weeks.

Vero Beach City Marina is chock full of boats at their mooring field and their marina. We ask to be at a mooring and we are rafted with a 42 ft. Nordhaven from New Hampshire.  Our neighbors are a nice retired couple who live in Boxford, Mass. We are also following a group of boats from Annapolis, Maryland, who we first met in Cumberland Island. One of the “ring-leaders” of this group is a couple we met three years ago on a Tayana 37 (like we had at the time). Mark and Julie introduced us to the crews of three other boats and we hung out with them quite a bit at Vero Beach. Mark and Julie will need to head back to Annapolis, by car, as Julie (an Englishwoman) is having her interview and test for U.S. citizenship in two weeks.  The others are headed for the Bahamas – they may already be there as I type this. So our newfound group won’t be with us after Vero Beach; we end our stay there with a big Happy Hour party at Waldo’s on the beach side of town.

Ken and I spent quite a lot of time walking and alternately bikeriding while we were in Vero (and also in Titusville earlier) since we just have one bike. So Ken gave in and decided he would like to get a folding bike of his own. He now has a shiny black Schwinn with a comfy seat and cool ergonomic grips. We had a long ride back from the bike shop in the downtown part of Vero after he bought it, over a bridge, into the wind, but it was a good test ride.  Another ride took us to a town park and beach where we took a long beach walk, only the third time we’ve been on a beach on this trip.

Before we left Vero we introduced ourselves to Steve, a solo boater in a trawler at the dock. He’s from Duxbury (it does help with meeting people when you can read the town they’re from on the stern of their boat). He’s done the trip to Florida from Duxbury eleven times!

In Rio we have friends we met on our first Florida cruise who get us a space at a dock where a marina and restaurant used to be. Hurricanes had helped to demolish the buildings, which have been recently cleared off the land. Other problems have kept the dock space pretty much empty. We join our friends (working on fixing up a “new” boat they have just bought) and 5 or 6 other boats (mostly rehab projects). There is also a launch here that is used to access a schooner, anchored out in the St. Lucie River. The schooner is a former freight hauling boat that worked in the Buzzards Bay and Islands area, in Massachusetts. It was named LILY OF TISBURY and is wooden, and not very old. It is now just called LILY and has Maine as a hail. The current owners take out paying customers and leave from Stuart and surrounding towns. Today they have it at a festival on Hutchinson Island nearby.

So we are running errands in a car for the first time on our cruise, with our hosts Chris and Kevin Buckley. We got to meet Kevin’s brother who is visiting and is taking side trips each day for serious bird watching. He twice rented an airplane to get him to isolated spots to find birds that have been elusive. We finished a few projects that we just didn’t get to before we left home in October. We ate some good meals with the Buckleys. And we sat out a torrential rainstorm over the past 36 hours that left our dinghy three-quarters full of water (that’s a lot of water!) and a lot of stuff wet in our boat because somehow several large windows were open during the first night of the storm. We officially had more than 7.5 inches of rain (the report came in before the storm had ended).  It’s the first daytime rain we’ve had in six weeks.

We are still loving the wildlife here in central Florida. We saw manatees surfacing by our boat in Vero Beach, we have fish jumping clear out of the water in the dock area we are at now, and there is a great blue heron sitting on a piling that’s 12 feet from our stern each evening.  We have a new Audubon Florida guide now to help us learn more about what we are seeing

More Fascinating Nature, More Friendly Humans

Pictures: Rowers in Eau Gallie basin at sunset; PISCATOR leaving St. Mary's alongside us (the owners are from Vermont and took 18 years to finish the boat after buying a bare hull);large manatee backside, as big as a dinghy, as it does the "dead-man's-float" near the dock in Titusville; view from our boat of the St. Augustine waterfront with the moon about to set overhead (we were very close - this is not a telephoto shot); punch servers at the day-before-Thanksgiving party in St. Mary's (we lost all the pictures of the yummy food and boaters waiting to eat, sorry!)

Thanksgiving Dinner in St. Marys, Georgia was so much better than we had expected. We were assigned to cook a vegetable side dish, and each other boat crew was bringing one side-dish (or dessert or relish, etc.). Several townspeople cooked turkey and made gravy and stuffing and it all was assembled at the Riverview Hotel. Being a hotel, the seating was very comfortable, the buffet tables held warm and delicious food, and the camaraderie between boaters was an added dimension. We were about one-third down the line (there were estimated to be 210 people served).

The night before there had been a dock party with Painkillers Punch mix and ice provided (BYO for the rum). We could have attended an oyster roast after the party but opted out. Other gatherings were held in the days before we arrived. And there was an organizational VHF “meeting” each morning of Thanksgiving Week that you could listen in on and contribute to from your radio on your boat. It works like an old-fashioned party-line with announcements and requests and things for sale.

We met a couple from Scituate (who are traveling with two other boats from Scituate), a couple from Marion, and people from Vermont and Maryland, our tablemates at dinner. Just before dinner we were set-upon by a drifting sailboat in a difficult windy situation in the river. We tried to get another anchor down for the boat since the crew was ashore. They eventually got back and straightened things out but then in moving to a new spot to anchor, they went aground for several more hours. In the end we got to talk with the crew and they were a very nice family from Jacksonville, Florida. The mom is a veterinarian and their 13 (ish) year-old son was outgoing and not too embarrassed by all the commotion.

Since Thanksgiving we have bought fresh bread and veggies at the Fernandina Beach Farmer’s Market, have kayaked to a Jacksonville City Park – an island with walking trails and fishing docks, have sat with cruising people and tested micro brews while watching the Patriots in St. Augustine, have watched manatees lazily feeding on underwater grasses in Titusville, and have enjoyed the company of a couple from Middleton, Mass whom we’ve seen at several stops on the Waterway this week (we chatted some again last night when they stopped at our boat, moored next to their boat in Titusville). We also crossed paths with a family from Marshfield who have brought their two children along and are homeschooling while they sail and cruise.

Today we ended up in a wonderful “basin” just off of the Indian River section of the ICW. The area is called Eau Gallie and is part of Melbourne. The basin is part of a river but there isn’t too much current and we are out of the wind. It’s not isolated; there are nice homes on the edges of the basin and two quiet marinas, but there are only 3 boats anchored in here and the wildlife is plentiful. One pelican is persistently dive-bombing into the water, several osprey are calling from rooftops and mast tips, a manatee is about to surface near our boat, and lots of different wading birds, the long-legged kind, are flying around us. There’s a park full of palm trees that we’ll dinghy to and walk through, back at the entrance to the basin. I haven’t seen any other boats moving in here except our dinghy and another dinghy. Then all of a sudden at 4:30 pm a rowing shell with four rowers and a coxswain passes us, then two eight-man shells. They continue to pass us every 10 minutes or so as they go up and down the river. We find another group of eight practicing on a dry-land rowing machine in the park. There is a banner there indicating that they are from Melbourne High School. This is a great stop!

Looking to Thanksgiving

Pictures: View from Up the Creek, as we have lunch in Hilton Head; Jessie, Roy and Bertha bringing groceries back to their boat in Charleston (Ken arrived with groceries the same way about 45 min later); CALIBOGUE waiting to leave for Daufuskie Island with commuters; horses on Cumberland Island

It seems to be time for counting up, our blessings and other mathematical accountings. We are very fortunate to have good health so far, the time to travel and see the East Coast up-close-and-personal, and to have good support back “home”. Justin is doing a good job watching our house, raking leaves, and providing tech support over the phone. Tammy has sent us some great music on CDs that entertain us and is planning on connecting with us in Florida next month. Pete calls a lot and fills us in on the Patriots’ exploits and other news.

Our numbers so far, in miles traveled, are about 1150. We have been gone for 6 weeks. We have put 180 hours, approximately, on the engine. If we cover about the same distance as our trip three years ago, which was 4400 miles, then we are one-quarter of the way, not counting stops for R & R.

Our time in Charleston was fun, staying at a marina there for a night, and connecting up with friends Roy and Bertha who arrived there a day before us on their boat. They had a visitor from Vermont, a niece who flew in for a week to sail with them and we all hung out together. Just before leaving, the sports field next to the marina was the staging area for a jazz procession, New Orleans style, honoring a local man who was important in the music scene and who had died recently. A large number of people turned out and the jazz that the musicians played while processing to a church for the funeral was wonderful.

We also stayed at a marina in Hilton Head Island; up to now we had anchored every night except in Charleston and HHI (and the free dock in Elizabeth City). The dockmaster loaned us an extra bike and we rode in a circle from the west side of the island, to the beach on the east, then down to the south and over a bridge and back, about 15 miles counting a few side trips. The marina property has a pub,” Up the Creek” and we were regular patrons for two days. And we got to talk with the crew of a 1919 wooden 60 ft. ferry that travels regularly to Daufuskie Island (home to some of the South Carolina Gullah people).

We’ve been in Georgia for the past 4 days, today on the border with Florida. In the area we traveled through, Georgia has lots of marshland, sea islands, and wildlife. We continue to see eagles almost every day, porpoises, osprey, blue herons, pelicans, egrets and today we are near Cumberland Island where there are wild horses grazing on grasses growing along the high tide line. We stopped at the National Park Service Monument Fort Frederica two nights ago and we were told that if the battle that took place there in the early 1700s had not gone well for the British we might all be speaking Spanish right now!

We will be having Thanksgiving in St. Mary’s, Georgia, two miles from Cumberland Island and three miles from Fernandina Beach, Florida (by boat). Some of the townspeople prepare turkey for any boaters in the area, and the boaters bring dishes they have prepared, all coordinated by a volunteer committee. There may be 150 people there. We hope our family and friends have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and we’ll be back in touch in December.