Staged and Ready

We are sitting at anchor in “Hurricane Harbor”, a small inlet on the south side of Biscayne Bay south of Miami. We are waiting for the weather to moderate so that the kitties will not be unduly discomfited by our planned passage to the Bahamas.

From Lantana, the trip south enters what is known as “The Canyon”, a region of the ICW that is almost completely developed with houses and apartments and condos and golf courses. The walls of the ICW are lined with walls that can make the wave action reverberate and generate some serious chop. Luckily, we made the trip from Lantana to Ft. Lauderdale on a Friday, before the weekend traffic got going in full. It was mostly smooth sailing till about 10 mile north of Ft. L. when the early weekenders started to show up. We saw an enormous number of amazing houses, interspersed with 1950’s bungalows and even some real “fixer-upper” shacks.

We timed the bridges well, and only had to wait longer than 5 minutes once. When we got to Ft. L, we ducked into Lake Sylvia, and anchors with about 6 other boats in 8 ft of water. The charts say this lake has a really shallow entrance, and shallow spots inside, but we found 7 feet everywhere, and only had one surprise, when it seemed like we hit some sort of submerged obstacle as we were leaving on Saturday morning. No damage seemed to have occurred, and we proceeded into Port Lauderdale, where there were 8 cruise ships docked where rxc used to come in his Navy ship. At that time, there were only a few cruise ships around, and one that arrived while the SoCar was in Ft. L. was an event for the locals. South Florida has clearly come a long way since 1975…

We went outside at Ft. L. because we can’t fit below the Julia Tuttle Bridge in Miami, and the weather could not have been better. NW at 10-15, with seas less than 2 feet. We set the sails and cruised at 7-8knots down the coast, in 400 feet of water, about 3 miles offshore. The two humans thought the motion was great, but the kitties did not agree. In spite of having a quarter of Bonine tablet in her, Calypso drooled from breakwater to breakwater, Dante stayed up on deck in the “dead-cat” position, and the old ladies variously suffered as best as they could. We entered Miami about 2:00 pm, motored past the Miami boat show into the region of islands behind Miami Beach, and anchored within a stone’s throw of Miami Beach near the Collins Canal.
We discovered that we have been very lucky up in the Chesapeake with the relative lack of hot-dogging motor boats. Down here they are EVERYWHERE, going flat out right past anchored boats, not caring at all about their wakes. Luckily, they seem to almost completely disappear after dark, so we slept well. We took the dinghy up the canal Sunday morning and had breakfast and did some last-minute shopping at the Epicure Market. It took some bravery to leave the dinghy locked to a rusty ring-boat on the canal, but the cruising gods were kind to us, and it was still there when we returned. We left Miami Beach and motored down into Biscayne Bay in a gathering storm, which dumped a lot of rain on us throughout the day and into the nite. We filled up with water and fuel at the Crandon park Marina, and dropped off our last trash before staging here, with the alarm set for 2:00 AM.

The alarm went off at 2, and we listened to the NWS prediction, which is notorious for its inaccuracies – south winds 15-20 with offshore seas of 4-6 feet. Considering the kitties, we decided to go back to bed, and wait for better weather. This turned out to be a good decision.

Today was a slow day, with a general boat cleanup, fixup of various small items, and finally a successful connection to the internet. This last item is really amazing, because our laptops cannot sense any WiFi signal hear, but the external antenna is picking up a signal from somewhere and connecting us for free. Highly recommended for cruisers. We just looked at the weather forecast for tonite, and it looks like 5 knot winds, and seas as calm as they get, so we will set the alarm again for 2, and motor over, if necessary. At 7 knots, we should get to Bimini in the early morning and we can recover at a marina there before pushing on.

We STILL do not have a quote on shipping the boat, so our plans for May are still up in the air, but it does look like we will be back in the Stuart area in mid-April, to either stage for a transatlantic sail, or to stage to bring the boat down to Ft. L to ship it over. We think the kitties will have to go by air, on Air France some time in late April, and if we sail the boat back, rxc will return to Stuart to meet with the crew. This will also give us some time to find a place to park the boat in France, whenever it arrives.

Off to the Bahamas tonite…