Monday, April 30, 2007

Great Bahama Bank to Northwest Channel, Bahamas

47.8 nm
Wind: ENE 10-15 knots
Seas: 2-3 feet
Latitude: 25°26.38’N
Longitude: 078°11.22’W
Maximum speed: 5.8 knots
Maximum speed under sail: 5.4 knots
Average speed: 4.3 knots

We motor-sailed today, again. If you recall my diatribe from way back when, in January, when we were motor-sailing off the coast of South Carolina, I’m not a big fan. The Gentleman’s Guide, however, is a huge fan of the motor-sailing. We are going 700 miles to windward, I know, and tacking in fifteen knots of wind is not that fun, especially for 700 miles. I still wish we could sail for real, though, especially because we go so much faster under sail. Leaving our main up adds about a knot to a knot-and-a-half to our motoring alone speed, and it does feel good to have canvas up instead of being a strict powerboat as we were in the ICW, but I still wonder how much different this trip would be if our diesel weren’t an ever-so-easy option. We would be world-class sailors by now, instead of piddly little fossil-fuel users.

I’m trying not to complain, though. My captain likes his engine. And neither of us are that good at sailing, having little experience, so that hum of the diesel is comforting and safe and consistently fast. We did try to sail this morning, even sailing off our anchor for the first time in forever (it’s not hard when there’s no land in sight), and messed around trying to get a good angle on the wind. We couldn’t seem to sail closer to the wind than 50°, for whatever reason. It may have to do with our baggy old sails, or that we still have our 130 genoa up, or that our rig’s a little saggy after all this time. Karl’s going to try to tune it at our next stop, and maybe put our 110 lapper up.

I really feel, though, that it’s more that were just missing some crucial elements in the art of sailing. We’re completely self-taught--I sailed Hobie cats a couple of times with my dad under the age of ten, and then Karl and I went out on his friend’s forty-foot ketch, but aside from that, all of our experience is from books and what we’ve taught ourselves. That’s our dirty little secret. (Secret? Our boat? She can be dirty and little, too, but that’s our own fault, at least the dirty part) I don’t admit that very often to anyone we meet, but I guess I finally feel like I can come clean about it here because we have gotten a fair ways. But we don’t know how to stow line. We don’t know how to heave to, something I keep nagging Karl about to practice. We don’t know how to tie a bowline--every time I need to, I get out our Coast Guard Boating Skills and Seamanship. When we sail, we guess at the wind speed and our angle to it, and ruling by consensus, we give it our best shot.

But I still have all these questions. Why is that sometimes it seems like we can sail 30° off the wind, and other times we can barely hit 50°? How do we rig our staysail? Can we use our spinnaker pole as a whisker pole so we can run more efficiently? Today our ordeal seemed to be link to our dependence on our electronic autopilot. Sometimes the Master doesn’t steer that efficiently. But yesterday, the Master beat beautifully, and the wind was barely stronger today, at least in the morning, so what changed? It had to be something we were doing wrong.

We both have phobias, too--Karl doesn’t always like the jib, and I don’t always like the main. The boat’s just so fast and she can heel so much that we both feel a little out of control when we sail. Sometimes that out of control feeling is good, and other times it scares the bejeezus out of me.

We’re anchored again in the middle of nowhere tonight, just west of a place called the Northwest Channel, where we’ll cut back through into the deep ocean and hopefully catch some fish. In all my whining about sailing I forgot to mention the biggest news of the day: we caught a fish!! Just a barracuda, but a giant one. We let it go because of ciguatera, the food-poisoning disease you can get from barracudas who eat other little fish who eat off poisonous reefs. We’ve read that you can eat barracudas that are smaller than four pounds, but I’m not sure I’d risk it even then. They’re not supposed to be very yummy. So our fishing luck is changing, but not so much yet.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Bimini to Great Bahama Bank, Bahamas

24.3 nm
Wind: NE 5-10 knots
Seas: 1-2 feet, flat on Bank
Latitude: 25°29.48’N
Longitude: 078°59.89’W
Maximum speed: 5.1 knots
Maximum speed under sail: 4.9 knots
Average speed: 3.7 knots

“A weather window starts only after swells have abated, but when it starts, take the leading edge of it and don’t delay. If you really want to attend one more beach bonfire, or one more dance at the Peace and Plenty, or you already invited the boat next door for cocktails, then enjoy yourself and wait for the next window.” --Bruce Van Sant, The Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South

This is advice that we did not take today. This guide, which traces what is called the “thorny path” from Florida to Venezuela, has become our Bible. Evidently it’s everyone’s Bible down here from talking to other cruisers. It’s funny, because before we left I asked for advice on books in an online sailing forum, and one person recommended it. Everyone else jumped on him because Van Sant was too opinionated. “It’s his way or the highway,” someone grumbled.

Let me tell you, though--that’s what you need out here. It’s called the thorny path to windward for a reason, and the reason is that you have to sail 700 miles into the face of the wind. Karl and I are just beginning to wrap our minds around that. That’s why some people recommend the Mexico route, despite the 400-mile passage.

I didn’t even know what trade winds were before we left, nor, I imagine, do you. They are the wind that is sucked into the equatorial zone to fill the void left by the super-heated air that ascends up into the atmosphere. In the northern hemisphere they’re sucked east by the Coriolis Effect and the equatorial current, in the south, they’re sucked west. This means, for all practical purposes, the wind blows east. All the time. East: exactly the direction we need to go. So Bruce tells us how to do that, how to use the wind and the islands and the fronts and the troughs against themselves. He obeys Francis Bacon’s dictum: “Nature, to be commanded, must be understood.”

So that’s our task over the next three months or so, understand nature and bash 700 miles to windward, and to do that we need to be able to wake up in the morning. Not exactly our strong suit, if you are a follower at all of our meanderings. Or if you know me. Or Karl. We especially need to be able to wake up to get out of town on a day when the wind is blowing a lovely five knots out of the northeast and can carry us on a lovely close reach all the way across the Great Bahama Bank where the water is completely flat.

As usual, however, we did not do that. Instead, we stayed up until two in the morning chatting with Adam, of s/v Eve (hardeehar), a single-hander from Brooklyn who pulled into the marina yesterday, and listening in our cockpit to the live zydeco versions of Beatles tunes from the bar on the water next to the marina, and frying up some delicious summer squash and tomato over rice at midnight. So we didn’t leave Bimini until noon and wasted half of a lovely fading cold front. Oh well. We’ll get the hang of it eventually. Either that, or we’ll end up beating into 35-knot trade winds and eight-foot seas for an eternity. I don’t think it’d take very much of that to learn our lesson.

It was still a gorgeous sail. The Great Bahama Bank is a shallow stretch of water that stretches fifty miles from Bimini to the Berry Islands. After we got comfortable with depths of 7-8 feet, we pulled out all our sail and had a lovely gurgling beat at around four knots across the Bank. Sometimes I think Secret sails best on a beat at 5-10 knots. She flies across the water, with the least bit of a tilt sideways, the water burbling past. It was exhilarating.

Even more exhilarating is our anchorage tonight. There’s absolutely nothing out here, so the guidebooks recommend anchoring two miles below the rhumbline to cross the Bank, to put out an anchor light, and hope you don’t get run into by another boat on a night passage. So we’re anchored completely out of sight of land. It’s just us, our little house, and the almost full moon, in the middle of the great wide ocean.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Bimini, Bahamas

0 nm
Wind: NE 5-10 knots
Seas: Two feet on the Atlantic

Today began the culture shock. For Karl, who’s never traveled internationally aside from Canada and Mexico, it’s exhilarating, and for me, too, but everyone goes through that little jolt of discomfort when realizing that you’re actually someplace new and foreign. I’ve seen it already in cruisers, those who klatch together and think that everything in the new country is deficient in some way, the subtle racism and xenophobia. Or not so subtle. We’ve already been told that Bahamians are “lazy.” We’ve been told (by South Africans) to watch out for the “blacks.”

I guess my culture shock has less to do with the Bahamians--I’m already completely in love with this country--than watching the horrific cross-cultural interactions of the Americans. It’s always been our goal to go as “goers” not tourists. But this island is rife with people who want nothing more than to be tourists. Not our fellow cruisers, but all the weekenders who jet over from Miami and want everything to be like it is back home.

We decided to stick around a second night at the marina, partly to try to get everything straighted out on the boat so we won’t have to stop off in Nassau, the capital, and partly just to orient ourselves to our new surroundings. We spent most of the morning chatting with Kiminy, the Bahamian dockmaster at the marina, who’s probably around 25. He told us how the island has changed in the last ten years, how the big resort they’re building at the end of the island is bringing in jobs but also strangers. He used to know everyone on the island, he said. He told us about the hurricanes that have hit here, and being sent away to school in Nassau, which used to be the nearest place to get an education. He told us about the town drunks and crazies, and also the cheapest place to buy diesel and ice.

We wandered around the dusty little town all day, trying to engage shopkeepers and locals in conversation. Their immediate reaction is to expect you to be like every other American who visits the island. I like to think they thought we were different. We look different, at least. I think I’m the only foreigner I saw wearing a skirt, and Karl in his beard and his tattered straw hat looks like Huck Finn grown up. I don’t know if we look like dirtbags or hippies or what we are, people who are here for the long haul.

The Americans are consistently shocking. We saw a girl walking down the middle of the street, probably 21, wearing a thong bikini. From the back she looked completely naked, nothing to indicate she was wearing clothing except two strings. All the Bahamian men craned their necks to watch her pass, and she sauntered down the street, back to her gated marina and her million-dollar powerboat. What must they think of us? I keep asking myself. How can they even think of us as human beings? Americans to them are slutty drunk girls and rich obnoxious foul-mouthed men.

Hiking trails and living in New England I became fairly accustomed to the way today’s youth seem to use profanity as punctuation, but in a foreign land the habit seems disgusting and obscene. The marina we’re in is very cheap and low-key, but the big powerboats dock here to clear in before they jet off to nighttime anchorages. They lounge around on their gigantic sport-fishing boats, drinking beers and complaining about the customs fees. I’ve seen several groups that made my jaw drop. One group of kids in what appeared to be some dad’s boat walked by at eleven o’clock in the morning glassy-eyed and completely wasted. The girl was wearing a designer wrap and $500 sunglasses. Most Bahamians appear to be decently well-off, but the Americans here flaunt their wealth like it’s a weapon. No wonder we have to worry about pirates! Even Kiminy, who has a great job, probably makes about $500 a month. And kids in America walk around wearing that on their faces.

One woman, walking back to her hotel room lugging a cooler full of ice, beer, and the Bahamian fish they had just caught, quipped, bitterly, “Where’s the bellhop?” Another, when a dockboy tried to sell her some conch, said, “$10? That’s all?” The girl with the sunglasses, walking by, said, “It’s the Bahamas, bitch.” A man, complaining about the new conch restrictions (only Bahamians can take them now, since they were so severely overfished) complained to Kiminy, “I have to justify the gas it takes to get over here, you know.”

We’re just finishing up The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, the third in a brilliant British fantasy trilogy that I can’t recommend highly enough. In it, in a crazy parallel universe, these giant white swan-like birds who use their wings like sails come periodically to our heroes’ village and pillage everything in sight. They’re called tualapi. They waddle through the houses, tear apart the food stores, steal everything of value, leave droppings everywhere, and then sail off over the ocean. I can’t help think of Americans like tualapi, at least here. They soar over here in their beautiful spotless white boats, burning all of the world’s oil, fish the ocean out of all its valuable big game, and then look down their noses at their hosts. They crap on everything they see.

Our goal, as we travel, is to be different. To change how people see us, to be noble ambassadors of our country, of our race. That may be a taller order than I had envisioned.

Friday, April 27, 2007

No Name Harbor, FL, to Bimini, Bahamas

56.1 nm
Wind: SE 10-15 knots
Seas: 5-8 feet
Latitude: 25°43.36’N
Longitude: 079°17.92’W
Maximum speed: 6.6 knots (under sail)
Average speed: 3.7 knots

This morning I woke up to the sunrise in a glorious blue sky and deep blue luscious water, the water on the other side of the Gulf Stream. Karl woke me up for my shift and I was actually able to sail for some of it, a lovely tack along the first Bahamian islands after escaping the inexorable pull of the current.

Bimini finally approached. We’re using the Explorer charts given to us by Marcel, but we don’t know what year they’re from. They overlay beautifully with our GPS and we trusted them to the letter, following the track laid in over six-foot spots of coral and shoals. Halfway into the harbor, still exhausted from the night’s efforts, the noon sun beating down on us, we notice an entrance channel dug out and well-marked far off from our course that all the giant sports fishermen seem to be using. “What’s that?” Karl goes. “I don’t know,” I say, “It’s not on the chart.”

We later found out that it was the new channel dredged to a depth of fifteen feet, and missing it was the first of our many faux pas of the day. After limping unscathed into the harbor we puttered up and down the channel about eight times, looking for the anchorage marked both on our chart and in our guidebook. The beautifully marked entrance channel led right through the middle of the anchor marked on our charts, and try as we might, we could find no place to drop a hook. I don’t know if it was our long night or the clarity of the water, but every time we escaped the channel the water shoaled up right away, and even if our depth sounder didn’t ding huge black patches blocked our way. We had been warned to watch for black patches so even though they looked like grass we avoided them. We still had to clear in, after all, and we didn’t want to do it while aground.

Finally, out of desperation, we began to hail the harbormaster, as recommended by our guidebook, only to be told by an annoyed local that there is no Bimini harbormaster. He told us to go to Weech’s Dock, a marina at the harbor entrance, and clear in there. Which is where we are now. It ended up being a great decision. Several cruisers going the other way, back to Florida and then up north for the summer, helped us with our lines and showed us the proverbial robes for getting through customs. Customs ended up being relatively painless, if confusing in our sleep-deprived state. Karl’s passport has its first stamp in it, and that’s what matters.

Tonight our fellow cruisers invited us to our first crusing potluck, the stuff of Bahamian legend. We had fresh conch salad and snapper grilled on bed of fresh dill, as well as steak and pigeon peas and a cake baked in a cruising oven. I contributed a salad, made with all my vegetables on the verge of turning. Everyone leapt on it, as I imagine fresh greens are the things that go most wanting around here. Karl and I poked around in a couple of stores this afternoon, and, as promised, aside from fish and rum, the prices are ungodly. I am very, very glad, for the many trips to the Winn-Dixie with the giant backpack. I wish we had bought more. But I’m sure we have enough to get all the way to the Dominican Republic, potentially supplementing with a couple of over-priced tomatoes and mangoes. And fish, if we can swing it.

The craziest thing about tonight was how doable everyone made our formative plan sound. People said they had heard great things about Luperon, in the Dominican Republic, our destination for hurricane season. No one made us feel crazy for going the “wrong way,” southeast in the Caribbean heading into May. And these are experienced crusiers, too, one guy who’s been cruising the Bahamas since the seventies, a German Atlantic crosser, and two single-handers who met on their own boats and have now coupled up. For the first time I feel like our plan is realistic, maybe even intelligent. No one’s said that we can’t do it, only that they wish they were doing it with us. I feel like we’ve joined a real community at last, a community different from the one that motors up and down the ICW every year. These people sail, for real.

So we’ll sleep well tonight, if the no-see-ums don’t eat us alive. I always forget there’s a reason we don’t pay for dockage, even at seventy cents a foot. Land-based life sucks. I just hope we don’t get any cockroaches on the boat.

No Name Harbor, FL, to Bimini, Bahamas

56.1 nm
Wind: SE 10-15 knots
Seas: 5-8 feet
Latitude: 25°43.36’N
Longitude: 079°17.92’W
Maximum speed: 6.6 knots (under sail)
Average speed: 3.7 knots

This morning I woke up to the sunrise in a glorious blue sky and deep blue luscious water, the water on the other side of the Gulf Stream. Karl woke me up for my shift and I was actually able to sail for some of it, a lovely tack along the first Bahamian islands after escaping the inexorable pull of the current.

Bimini finally approached. We’re using the Explorer charts given to us by Marcel, but we don’t know what year they’re from. They overlay beautifully with our GPS and we trusted them to the letter, following the track laid in over six-foot spots of coral and shoals. Halfway into the harbor, still exhausted from the night’s efforts, the noon sun beating down on us, we notice an entrance channel dug out and well-marked far off from our course that all the giant sports fishermen seem to be using. “What’s that?” Karl goes. “I don’t know,” I say, “It’s not on the chart.”

We later found out that it was the new channel dredged to a depth of fifteen feet, and missing it was the first of our many faux pas of the day. After limping unscathed into the harbor we puttered up and down the channel about eight times, looking for the anchorage marked both on our chart and in our guidebook. The beautifully marked entrance channel led right through the middle of the anchor marked on our charts, and try as we might, we could find no place to drop a hook. I don’t know if it was our long night or the clarity of the water, but every time we escaped the channel the water shoaled up right away, and even if our depth sounder didn’t ding huge black patches blocked our way. We had been warned to watch for black patches so even though they looked like grass we avoided them. We still had to clear in, after all, and we didn’t want to do it while aground.

Finally, out of desperation, we began to hail the harbormaster, as recommended by our guidebook, only to be told by an annoyed local that there is no Bimini harbormaster. He told us to go to Weech’s Dock, a marina at the harbor entrance, and clear in there. Which is where we are now. It ended up being a great decision. Several cruisers going the other way, back to Florida and then up north for the summer, helped us with our lines and showed us the proverbial robes for getting through customs. Customs ended up being relatively painless, if confusing in our sleep-deprived state. Karl’s passport has its first stamp in it, and that’s what matters.

Tonight our fellow cruisers invited us to our first crusing potluck, the stuff of Bahamian legend. We had fresh conch salad and snapper grilled on bed of fresh dill, as well as steak and pigeon peas and a cake baked in a cruising oven. I contributed a salad, made with all my vegetables on the verge of turning. Everyone leapt on it, as I imagine fresh greens are the things that go most wanting around here. Karl and I poked around in a couple of stores this afternoon, and, as promised, aside from fish and rum, the prices are ungodly. I am very, very glad, for the many trips to the Winn-Dixie with the giant backpack. I wish we had bought more. But I’m sure we have enough to get all the way to the Dominican Republic, potentially supplementing with a couple of over-priced tomatoes and mangoes. And fish, if we can swing it.

The craziest thing about tonight was how doable everyone made our formative plan sound. People said they had heard great things about Luperon, in the Dominican Republic, our destination for hurricane season. No one made us feel crazy for going the “wrong way,” southeast in the Caribbean heading into May. And these are experienced crusiers, too, one guy who’s been cruising the Bahamas since the seventies, a German Atlantic crosser, and two single-handers who met on their own boats and have now coupled up. For the first time I feel like our plan is realistic, maybe even intelligent. No one’s said that we can’t do it, only that they wish they were doing it with us. I feel like we’ve joined a real community at last, a community different from the one that motors up and down the ICW every year. These people sail, for real.

So we’ll sleep well tonight, if the no-see-ums don’t eat us alive. I always forget there’s a reason we don’t pay for dockage, even at seventy cents a foot. Land-based life sucks. I just hope we don’t get any cockroaches on the boat.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

En route from No Name Harbor, FL, to Bimini, Bahamas

Wind: SE 10-15 knots
Seas: 5-8 feet lumpy chop in Gulf Stream

We did it. We’re here, on the high seas, heading for foreign lands, heading for paradise. It’s another of our glorious night passages, and though we don’t have any sail out, and we’re motoring full-bore into fifteen-knot headwinds and eight-foot seas, the moon’s out and we’re heading to tropical islands. Life doesn’t get much better.

We left Biscayne Bay right at dusk, weaving through the coral reefs at the entrance to the channel, trusting to our GPS and charts in the dark. When we finally wound around the bottom of Key Biscayne and hit the wind and seas full strength I wondered if maybe we had made a mistake. We had wavered right until the very last minute, when we had tried to nap and been unable to, until Karl finally asked, “Are we doing this thing?” and we yanked the dinghy up and motored on out of there. A guy on the deck of a boat from Brooklyn came out and quizzed us as we motored by--he’s heading to Bimini, too, in another day.

I took the first off-watch at around nine, after we laid in our course. I drifted in and out of sleep, but the seas are scary out here. We’re pounding right into them, motoring at full speed. We can’t sail at all, because we’re dead into the wind and if we tack we’ll either be sailing directly opposite the Gulf Stream current or letting it carry us far too north of where we want to go. That’s frustrating, but at least we’re going the direction we want to be going. And we finally made our decision.

The noise the waves make as the break against the boat is deafening. It sounds like a giant crack against the bow, and when a particularly spectacular one smacks up against us it wakes me up every time. Then there’s the pound as our little boat goes up and over, and thuds back down in the trough on the other side. We’re definitely putting Secret through her paces--her hull is flexing like crazy--but her sleek bow cuts right through the waves. It’s much more frightening being the person inside the boat on the off-watch, too. As soon as I got out here for my watch, even though it was scary to watch the seas zooming up off the bow, I calmed right down, realizing that the boat could handle it.

I hope the motor can, too. We’re motoring at full open throttle, something we’ve never done before, and fighting the Gulf Stream we’re going barely three knots. Eventually we’ll get to the other side and its pull will weaken and we’ll be able to make better time. But right now it’s just satisyfying to be making progress, to be out here alone with the waves and the wind and the moon, to see our brave adventure laid out in front of us.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Crandon Park Marina to No Name Harbor, FL

4.1 nm
Wind: SE 15-20 knots
Seas: moderate chop in Biscayne Bay
Latitude: 25°40.62’N
Longitude: 080°09.76’W
Maximum speed: 4.2 knots
Average speed: 3.6 knots

We escaped Lise and Marcel’s clutches today--not that we mind their clutches, they’re very pleasant clutches to be in thrall to, but they do tend to keep us from moving. The first time we hung out with them in town was our first zero day on the boat, and we stayed with them there for a week. Ah, those long ago New Jersey days. They seem so far away. They are so far away.

We didn’t get very far, though, just down the Bay two harbors, to what is termed in our new Bible of cruising, The Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South, a “staging anchorage.” One “stages” in an anchorage as close as possible to one’s exit channel, with a short anchor rode and one’s dinghy on deck, to be able to grab the “weather window” the minute it opens. So here we sit, awaiting our weather window. It’s supposed to open up tomorrow night, but we waver every three hours.

Today we had firmly decided on the Bahamas, and two hours later Karl had convinced me that the Gulf Coast was the place to go. We don’t have a quarantine flag (the yellow flag one flies on one’s starboard spreader before clearing through customs) and we don’t have a Bahamian courtesy flag, both of which are things we need and which we can’t get from our staging anchorage. We don’t have an SSB receiver. We don’t have a bimini cover or any shelter from the sun. We don’t have enough spare fuel or water tanks or an outboard engine for our dinghy or about eighty percent of the other things that everyone says you absolutely CAN’T do the Bahamas without. The one thing we do have is our window. Should we take it?

It’s really exhausting, actually, agonizing over the decision together. It’s exhausting still being undecided. If we had decided, say, a month ago, we would have our flags and the right guidebooks and maybe even a better radio or fishing equipment. Our indecision is often our undoing. Then again, it is also our charm. Today we also dug through our rag bag, looking for yellow rags to be made into a quarantine flag and a white-ish rage I can color in with my red, blue, and black Sharpies to use as a Bahamian ensign. Nothing like showing respect for a foreign nation like a colored-Sharpie flag.

Who knows what we’ll do. We’ll probably agonize until the absolute last second and then throw our dinghy on deck and go.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Crandon Park Marina, FL

0 nm
Wind: NE to E 15-20 knots

Our window to the Bahamas is holding. It makes me nervous and excited and scared all at the same time. I feel like J. Alfred Prufrock. Dare I eat a peach? As old ladies say in France before they cross the street: on ne oserais pas! Dare I? Dare we? Are we really ready? There are a zillion things we still need. At least a zillion, maybe more. The thing that scares me the most is our lack of an SSB receiver. Without one of those, or a barometer, our sole source of weather is our little handheld VHF radio, with its receiving radius of three nautical miles. Is it just stupid to go without an SSB? Or do all these people just use this gear as an excuse not to go? People have been doing this for millenia, after all, without laptops and SSB radios and GPS and satellite television and weather routers. A lot less successfully than they do now, to be fair.

Lise and Marcel have made their decision, they told us tonight. They’re leaving for St. Augustine on Thursday, to spend the hurricane season at a marina there, with their friends on the Hispaniola. I can’t imagine--if we did decide to stay in Florida, it’d be here or someplace south. There’s no way I’m turning around. That may be our fatal flaw, or it may be our saving grace.

We had a blast today, though. The other day at the library I got an email from an Appalachain Trail friend who refused to let us pass by Fort Lauderdale without seeing him. I regretted to inform him that we were already past Fort Lauderdale, but Key Biscayne was one of his stomping grounds too, so he came out and visited us before his night shift at work. Lise and Marcel came over too, for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and the group of five of us was disparate enough to be amusing.

Boo Boo, our friend from the AT, had recently returned from a five-month stint in Africa where we was building a clinic for a non-profit. He had crazy stories to tell, as one would imagine, about the locals and the paddies (the Irish nonprofit contingent) and his fellow expats. When he was there there was a funeral every night for another person lost to AIDS. He had three of his friends die, young men, under 25, who had been helping him build. He also had $200 stolen from him, money he needed to backpack around the country as was his plan. He was on a tight budget, so it was a big loss, but now he makes $40 an hour as an electrician at the airport. The person who stole the money could feed their family off that for three years. It really put things into perspective for me, as we prepare to (potentially) move overseas. How much more we Americans have than the rest of the world. How little we realize it. How rich every single last one of us is.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Crandon Park Marina, FL

0 nm
Wind: E 10-15 knots, building to 15-20

We made a second trip to Key Biscayne today, for even more canned goods. Instead of waiting for a taxi for three hours with Lise, we took the bus with a gigantic trail backpack full of cans. It was one of those homeless people moments, as we waited for the bus, stinky and unshaven, with our huge stinky backpack and piles of groceries. All of the Latina nannies waiting for their bus ride back to Miami shied away from us.

On the plus side, we saw both a Ferrari and a vivid orange Lamborghini, proving to Karl that this town really is as luxe as I promised. We counted the Mercedes today. It seems the BMWs come out on the weekends. Karl saw a very lovely looking seventy-year-old lady and commented on her. I said, “Surgery will do wonders!” He cavilled, saying, “She could just be a very nice looking older lady...” I rolled my eyes. Men just don’t understand.

We foreswore dinner with the Canadians, as we have fresh vegetables, bread, and ground beef moldering back at the boat, and I made a delectable salad to accompany the burgers Karl cooked up for us. It is a lot cheaper when you make your burgers yourself, instead of frequenting the dining establishments of the community. Especially this community. Although I picked up one of those free restaurant guides just to see what they have. There were a couple of Thai places that also serve sushi--if we really go to the Bahamas, I wonder how long it will be before I have Thai food again? It’s things like that about leaving the States that you think might get to you. Really good pizza, for instance. Or Chinese food.

But we might be able to come by sushi, if we’re lucky and smart. We bought the last piece of gear we need to rig our Cuban handline system, which I’m building piece by piece, to the letter, from a Cruising World article. We’re supposed to be able to catch tuna with it, in theory, which we can use to make our own sushi. That will be a day to remember. I wonder if I’ll regret not buying the elaborate Penn rod and reel setup that Karl wanted to buy in St. Lucie. He always wants to spend money on gear and I’m always the cheapskate naysayer who regrets it later. Then again, I’m the one who keeps track of the budget.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Crandon Park Marina, FL

0 nm
Wind: NE 15-20 knots, gusting to 25

I made it to the grocery store today, taking the bus into Key Biscayne with Lise. This town is a whole different world--I felt like I had actually wandered into the celebrity world from yesterday’s magazines. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been in a city with this much money. I was in my beat-up boat clothes and sandals, a baseball cap, still unshaven and unshowered, with Karl’s gigantic, stinky, trail backpack so I could cart groceries back on the bus. I felt like an alien from another planet. Every woman I saw was a size two at most, and most had overt breast implants and plastic surgery. The men were rotund and old, with women who looked about half their ages, but that might have just been the botox. Every second car on the street was a BMW or Mercedes, and the rest were obscure European SUVs I had never heard of: Porsches, Volvos, Audis.

Even the grocery store, a normal Winn-Dixie, was a creature apart. I had looked at their saver brochure that Lise had, and they had good prices, but when I got there it felt like an elite boutique grocery store, with artisanal wines, breads, and cheeses, staff plying me with grilled South American sausages, and misted fresh herbs displayed in artistic piles. What was funny about the whole ordeal was marching around the designer-attired fifty-year-olds with their premade arugula salads with a grocery cart full of cabbages, flour, onions, and canned beans. People looked at me, and then at my cart, with a vaguely shocked expression, and then averted their eyes. I started in the produce section, and having not seen a vegetable in three weeks, I over-loaded. Twelve pounds of onions (literally), three giant heads of cabbage, six tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, five pounds of oranges, three pounds of apples. I completely covered the bottom of my cart with produce. Then I attacked the canned and dry goods, the cheese aisle, bread. By the time I was done stuff was falling out of my cart, and I hadn’t seen a single person (other than Lise) who had more than five items in their fancy black-coated double-decker urbanite shopping carts. Here I am, a frontier wife among designer women. I should have looked for salt pork, chipped beef, and black-strap molasses. I almost did.

We then had to wait an hour for a taxi to take us back to the marina. Evidently the taxis around here have better things to do than to drag dirty cruisers and their groceries back and forth to their boats. So I certainly experienced some culture shock. Lise and Marcel kept going on and on about how everyone here spoke Spanish, but it still was a surprise to me. I expected the Spanish in the Miami area, but what I didn’t expect was this type of Spanish-speaker. Yet another stereotype with holes poked in it. Most Americans, I imagine, think of the Spanish immigrants in the US as illegal Mexicans, but these are high-class Latin Americans from all over the globe. According to our taxi driver, all of the upper class Argentinians, Chileans, Colombians, and Costa Ricans move here to live, and this city has one of the highest per capita net worths of any in the world. I felt like I was in a bizarre foreign country I had never heard of. When I asked passersby for the time, they struggled for the English words, like I did in France. It was a strange role reversal.

We shared another dinner with Lise and Marcel tonight, to which we were able to contribute at least a little, and they shared their electronic charts with us. I was thrilled to discover that their electronic charts work on our Apple. Maybe we are ready to go to the Bahamas. We’ll see. If the weather holds...

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Crandon Park Marina, FL

0 nm
Wind: E 10-15 knots, gusting to 20 in the afternoon, blustery, rain

Our plan today was to do a vast reprovision at the Winn-Dixie a bus ride away in town, but, as usual when we have ambitious plans, we decided to stay on the boat and loaf instead. Last night, Lise and Marcel gave us a huge stack of old sailing magazines, mainly Latitudes and Attitudes, a crazy cruising magazine run by a former Hell’s Angel turned live-aboard. Every time we tried to get up and actually do something, either Karl or I was pulled in by another article about fishing, or hurricanes, or weather reporting, or the South Seas. We traded magazines all day long--I’d find an article and show it to him, then he’d find one and show it to me, and then we’d spend another two hours on a new magazine.

Of course, Lise had a couple of gossip rags thrown in there for good measure, so I was able to drink my fill at the polluted spring of celebrity hijinks. I devoured all of them, and ended up by feeling far worse about my physical appearance than I have in a long time. When did all those fashionistas get so skinny? I know they always have been, but being an unshowered hippie with unshaven legs for months on end has made all the glitz and glamour seem all that much more shocking. Latitudes and Attitudes has a great column written from a women’s perspective, and they had a couple of articles written about maintaining one’s femininity on a boat. Mainly it involves wearing sarongs and not looking in mirrors. Sounds good to me.

Even though the rain and wind were whipping around in the afternoon, there appears to be a Bahamas weather window opening on Wednesday or Thursday. We’ve been waiting to be in this position for some time, but now that we’re actually some place which we could use as a jumping-off point, with a little weather window creaking open, I’m a little freaked out. Are we actually going to do this? Are we actually ready? What about hurricanes? What about everything?

I suppose you never really feel ready for the next stage of any adventure. You never really are ready until you do it. But are we ready enough to go? I don’t know. If we don’t go now, will we ever be ready? All everyone talks about now is hurricanes, hurricanes, all the time, but I’m not going backwards and we’re just as likely to get hit by a hurricane here as anywhere else. They say the best bet is to keep moving south and east, where if the hurricanes hit at least they’ll be weaker, and where there’s plenty of mangroves in which to hide. And they say April through June are the best winds to move. So who knows. Two months to the Dominican Republic? I suppose it’s possible.

Friday, April 20, 2007

South Lake to Crandon Park Marina, FL

20.6 nm
Wind: N 10 knots, shifting to the E 15 knots
Seas: Light chop
Maximum speed: 6.5 knots (pulled by current)
Average speed: 3.3 knots
Latitude: 25°43.35’N
Longitude: 080°09.49’W

It was a very frustrating day today, at least to begin with. We estimated that it was only about fifteen miles from Hollywood, where we anchored last night, to Key Biscayne, where we are tonight with Lise and Marcel, our crazy Canadian friends. After our glorious day of sailing yesterday, almost fifty miles, we figured that’d be a quick zip down the ICW. I was estimating two hours until we’d be able to see long lost Sea Belle and lounge beneath the setting sun.

Instead, it was one of our more gruesome days in Florida. We knew that there were a ton of restricted bridges in the Miami area, which is why people recommend that you go outside in the ocean rather than the ICW, but we’ve been requesting bridge openings for some time now, and I thought these looked fairly well spaced. How it works, at least in big cities, is that many bridges only open every half-hour or hour, and you have to hail them on your VHF radio and ask for a specific bridge opening. Today, we’d get through one bridge only to realize that the next was just out of range for us to hit in time for the next opening. So we either had to race ahead at six knots, burning our precious and increasingly expensive diesel, or dawdle along at three knots in the burning hot sun.

I think the sun was more worrisome today for me than it has been lately, mainly because of the brutal sunburn from yesterday. I’m beginning to think that we should have bought that bimini frame in St. Lucie. But we didn’t, so now we have to rig something up or buy a different one. My much-bragged-about heat tolerance may be getting wilted somewhat. On the plus side, it was interesting motoring through the multi-million-dollar Miami waterfront houses, one of which I’m sure is where Madonna lives. These houses were on a totally different level than the ones we’ve gone by so far--they were vast palatial estates, with elaborate manicured grounds, Tuscan-style piazzas and pillars, and abstract expressionist sculpture on the waterfront. As usual, the only people we saw were the Latino gardeners and housekeepers.

By the time we got south of Miami into Biscayne Bay the wind had picked up and we were both feeling very crabby and snapping at each other. We knew we had to pay for a mooring ball in this harbor, where anchoring is prohibited, but when we arrived at 5:15 the marina wouldn’t answer our hails. As seems obvious to me now, of course they were closed. We were frustrated angry, tired, hungry, and hot, and we couldn’t even find a place to rest. After circling the harbor about eight times we finally decided to try to dock at the deserted fuel dock, which was an ordeal in itself without any docklines or fenders out and about three knots of current off the dock. Thanks to some brilliant maneuvers on the part of Captain Karl we finally got tied up, and went to find the Canadians. It was great to see them again, but we were still upset, not knowing whether we should anchor, against the prohibitions in our guidebook, or pick up a random mooring ball in hopes that it didn’t belong to someone out sailing, or stay at the fuel dock all night and risk a vast fine in the morning.

We finally decided to anchor, only to meet a wonderful live-aboard Good Samaritan, who told us that the three mooring balls behind him were empty and that we could pay for them in the morning. So we picked one up and rowed over to Sea Belle for dinner, and as of now, things have definitely improved. We were able to lounge around in the sunset, and as our icebox is now exceedingly bare, Lise’s gourmet repast was even better than usual. Both Karl and I devoured gigantic salads, having not seen a fresh vegetable in about two weeks, and the lush, perfectly grilled pork chops were delectable. Our Canadian friends are far too good to us.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Lake Worth to South Lake, FL

We sailed today, a glorious sunny day, with the sky perfect blue and only a little bit of a ripple in the water, and steady fifteen-knot winds, right on our beam. It was, as they say, “a beam reach to paradise.” Not that we’re actually in paradise, right now. We’re in Hollywood, Florida, which is decidedly less glamorous than its California counterpart. But the sailing itself was paradise.

We woke up at dawn this morning, the first time we’ve done that in eons too, and sailed out of the inlet at first light. I knew the wind was going to coming from the west, shifting to the north later in the day, so I thought the sailing would be pretty good. But I was more than a little afraid of the Gulf Stream, six miles to port. We did feel it pulling us, at first. We were clipping along beautifully and heeling over like a witch and we were only going three knots according to the GPS! We finally figured out that we were too far from shore, heading into the edges of the Gulf Stream, which can run north as much as seven knots. So we reached back into shore, hovering around the 100-foot-deep mark on the depth sounder, and ended up going about six knots.

I was afraid, too, when we started sailing again. I was at the helm, and it was the first time we’ve actually sailed in more than four months, since we came in in Georgia. It’s always terrifying when you feel the wind catch the sails for the first time, and the boat heel over, and you realize just how much power your sails have. So much more than our little diesel has. And that power starts throwing stuff, and you, around the boat, and you feel this pit in your stomach, like, I have to control this gigantic machine? I’ve never had a feeling like that before in my life, before I started sailing. The closest feeling I can imagine is trying to ride a gigantic horse. I’ve never ridden horses before, but I always wanted to when I was a little girl, and the idea seems similar. Trying to convince this gigantic force of nature that it wants to do what you want it to do. You try to be smarter than it, or to find its groove and settle into it. When you can do that sailing, as I finally did today, you find your place.

The Master, our autopilot, wasn’t working today, which was partly why it was such a rewarding sail. It’s frustrating, sometimes, to think when you’re at the helm that you’re doing something that a machine could do much better, but it’s still fun when you feel like you’re sailing really well. But every time I think how if we were sailing more we’d probably already have invested the time and money into finding a machine that would steer well under sail--a sheet-to-tiller system or a wind-vane. I find myself rehearsing a mental list of all the things we still need to practice under sail: heaving to, man overboard drills, reefing, flying the spinnaker, flying the staysail, rigging a whisker pole somehow. I have to accept, though, that we are sailing, and we are making progress, and we’re heading into areas where we’ll be able to sail even more. We went sailing today for the first time in four months! That’s a great feeling. It’s great to feel like we’re recentering, even if we still have some kinks to work out.

So I hand-steered for about five hours today, and I’m burnt to a crisp now, and I fell in love with sailing all over again. Not all bad. Tomorrow we’re heading on to Miami, to reconnoiter with Sea Belle, and then perhaps, on to the Bahamas.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Hobe Sound to Lake Worth, FL

15.8 nm
Wind: SW 10-15 knots
Seas: Moderate chop
Maximum speed: 6.2 knots
Average speed: 3.8 knots
Latitude: 26°46.40’N
Longitude: 080°02.45’W

I’ve been trying to reconcile myself today with being a German peasant wife. Well, not exactly German, since I have little German ancestry, but Greek, or Scottish, or Polish, as Karl is. My sister bestowed upon me the latest New Yorker Style Issue, and its advertisements have been haunting me. I am not Kate Moss, sporting a giant Dior bag. Nor am I even a girl capable of wearing a bikini. I wear a perfectly modest one-piece, and as I get closer and closer to the climes of sand and sun, that fact begins to wear on me.

It could have to do with my upcoming thirtieth. I think to myself, as I sport my electric-blue TJ Maxx special: was this bathing suit designed for me? For the going-on-thirty gal not comfortable with the two-piece? Then again, I’ve never been comfortable with the two-piece, even at the age of fourteen, when every girl without knowing it is at the Platonic ideal of femininity. But we don’t know, so we miss it, and we spend the rest of our lives pining for the Platonic ideal of fourteen.

I think this to myself every day as I sprout hair in ever more Mediterranean places. The form God is trying to make me into is that of a robust Greek matriarch, which is my true heritage. I thought that last night, as I was baking my hearty peasant bread. The thing is that hearty peasant food is not designed for the likes of Kate Moss. Kate Moss eats cocaine and not much else. If I want to look like Kate Moss, as told by the New Yorker Style Issue, I, too, need to eat cocaine and not much else. Instead, I’m living a robust peasant life, eating peasant bread and sausages and garlic and preserved vegetables and legumes. Robust peasants do not look like Kate Moss.

So I’m trying to reconcile myself with that. I hope Karl will still be happy with a peasant wife ten years from now, instead of a fourteen-year-old Kate Moss substitute. I keep being confronted with my femininity on the boat, and I find myself wondering what it means to be feminine. Does it mean to shave my legs and my bikini line? Does it mean impeccably plucked eyebrows and perky boobs? Or does it mean the prehistoric mother goddess, with her swollen belly and her ponderous breasts? I try to see myself as a prehistoric mother goddess, or at least following in those lines. Because maybe that is true femininity. But it’s so hard to believe that when one is told by all the perfume and fashion ads differently.

Maybe this is inappropriate content for a boat blog. But I think about it all the time, so maybe it is appropriate content for my blog, and for any women out there reading it. How can I be true to myself, and still true to this obscure vision of beauty I possess in my subconscious? Or is that vision of beauty all a myth? Or am I just rambling, no longer coherent? I try to love myself. I try to sit here, on my boat, and accept myself as I am and accept my journey. But I find myself longing to be all these things other than myself--the perfect Florida trophy wife, for instance, who we keep running into, who has Botox and silicone and not much else to recommend her. Can I, myself, a 29-year-old Greek peasant, hope to stand up to her? I don’t know. I try not to care.

In the meantime, on the boat, we’ve made it to the Lake Worth inlet, and we’re anchored just this side of it, hoping to go outside tomorrow and sail for the first time since the disaster. Sailing will make me beautiful, right?

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Manatee Pocket to Hobe Sound, FL

11.7 nm
Wind: NW 10-15 knots
Seas: Light chop
Maximum speed: 5.5 knots
Average speed: 5.4 knots
Latitude: 27°00.25’N
Longitude: 080°05.73’W

It never ceases to amaze me how prophecies seem to be self-fulfilling. Two nights ago I was journalling about the perfect desert island, and here I am anchored off it. Well, not quite. (And that not quite is always the thing that gets me in trouble.) But we’re anchored off an island with white sand beaches, right off from Burt Reynolds’s house, if you can believe that, and we went for a swim and a walk today. The water was clear blue--not quite so clear that our dinghy looked like it was floating in nothing, but getting close. No coral yet. But the perfect desert island of my dreams lurks somewhere, so close, just on the edge of the horizon.

I have bread baking in the oven, since of our fresh food we have exactly one apple left. But even that is a glimpse of paradise--how long can we live off canned sardines and pasta and flour and yeast? A long time, I think. Karl’s throwing the casting net right now. As soon as we get out of Florida, we can start fishing in earnest. When our dinner can be caught before sundown, I will be a truly happy girl.

Not that I’m not a truly happy girl right now. I am, or I try to be, with all my heart. Our boat is spotless right now, cleaner than it’s been since we left Marion. Karl spent all afternoon scrubbing the teak of the toerail. I posted to the website this morning, and we’re making progress towards our destination. All our chores are done (almost). And yet, I still find myself beating myself up over things--why aren’t I doing yoga in the mornings yet? When am I going to start doing pushups so I can dive and scrape the hull better? Shouldn’t I be editing my novel? Of course. “Under heaven and earth, our work is never done.” Solomon said that, in Ecclesiastes. Even for us bums, our work is never done. So why can’t I just take a deep breath, and enjoy this moment, which, for all I know, is the best of my life?

I am. I do. Deep breath. Smell the bread. Listen to Karl as he tosses the net. Watch the waning light fade through the hatches.

We’ve been reading the Bible together, in the mornings, a revisitation of my youthful zeal. Jesus has good things to say, he really does. Yesterday we read the Last Supper, and that night for dinner we had bread and wine. Real, hearty, thick bread, frontier bread, as I call it, heavy with yeast and flour and oats. We ate it with a can of French Onion soup, and peanut butter, and wine. It was the Eucharist for us, in our little boat. Bread and wine. That’s all Jesus and his buddies were doing, sitting around, breaking bread, drinking wine. And here we are, on the boat, without a home, without any goal aside from this.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Manatee Pocket, FL

0 nm

Well, I've finally gone back and posted all of my old blog entries. It took me more than a couple of days to go back and read through my handwritten journal, find them all, type them up, and post them. So, if anyone cares, you can go back and read our exploits from before the disaster, at the end of January. I found one particularly dismal entry on which I commented on the state of our poor, cracked dinghy. If only we had known! Why didn't we do something then? But here we are, three months later. Three months! It's ridiculous.

I also posted from the end of March, when we left Daytona Beach, those first few glorious days of being back on the boat and moving. Lately those days have seemed distant again. I don't know if it was the loss of the computer or what, but our rhythm seems to be off. We're to entranced by stability, town, shops, all that stuff we're supposed to be escaping. We were supposed to have left here last Thursday, when we had the computer all set up, but one thing led to another, and here we are, almost a week later.

We did get a lot of stuff done in that week. For one thing, we scoured the boat top to bottom yesterday, something she sorely needed. Last week Karl reorganized all of our canned goods and discovered where we had holes in our inventory and where we need to stock up. We also put away all our winter clothes (hopefully for good, at least for a couple of years), and pulled out our tank tops and shorts from where they were buried under the vee-berth.

So we're fitting ourselves out for our vast international voyage. The Bahamas are only forty miles away from where I sit right now, but it's a huge forty miles. There's the Gulf Stream lurking out there, not to mention shoals and potentially corrupt customs officials and the much-talked-about trade winds. Lately, Karl's been leaning towards going the other way, hopping off from Key West to the Dry Tortugas, and thence--Mexico!! It's only 400 miles away, which would be a five-day passage, our longest ever. Dare we? I don't know.

We flipped a credit card on it the other night (for lack of a coin) and the card read Mexico. I'm still not sure we're brave enough. Even Karl, who was really pulling for the long passage, has seemed to be reneging. He's at least talking about buying Bahamian charts, so we'll see. Our plan really, as of today, is to make it down to Miami, where our crazy Canadian friends are waiting to cross to the Bahamas. We'll decide from there.

I can't wait to be off again, though. Computer in hand, charts at the ready, boat spick and span--we're ready to go places.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Manatee Pocket, FL

0 nm

My first journal entry on the new computer... It’s been so long. I’m completely out of the habit, and with my continual unhappiness with anything new, it seems so unfamiliar and different. I don’t have Word on the computer, so I’m having to use Apple’s word-processing software, and all my settings are different, and I don’t have my music... Still, though. I have nothing to complain about. I’m thrilled, even though we got ripped off on this computer. The seller knew about the problem with the graphics chip and sold it anyway, without saying anything, and the battery doesn’t hold a charge at all. Luckily, we have the backup battery from the other computer, but I do think we should get some money back. Whether it’s worth fighting for is another thing entirely.

We’ve more or less decided, though: we’re going to the Bahamas. Probably not the Abacos, the northern string of deserted islands that I really wanted to explore, but we’ll compromise and head to the Exumas instead, the southern string of deserted islands. It is scary--we have to get all our paperwork ready for customs, and really be sure we have our food staples in place, and set up our fishing equipment. It’s thrilling, though, too. If we actually get going in the next couple of days, we might finally make some progress. We’re about twenty miles away from the first jumping off point to the Bahamas, so, in theory, we’re three days from the perfect desert island anchorage. One day to Lake Worth, one day across to Bimini where we can clear in, and the third night: desert island anchorage.

I have this idealized mental picture of what perfect happiness is, and it means being anchored off a tiny island, covered in palm trees and ringed by perfect white sand beaches. Clear blue water, so clear we can see where the anchor holds in the sand. A nice coral reef, not too close to the boat, but close enough to protect us from the swell, crawling with lobster and grouper and other beautiful non-edible sealife for skin-diving. Enough driftwood on the beach for a campfire, and enough ripe coconuts to be able to poach our grouper in milk. Enough beach that we can tromp around the island on a hike. And no one else in the anchorage. That, is perfection. I’m not sure if that really exists, and somehow I doubt it, but if we manage to find it, someone remind me to pinch myself.

The anchorage here is beautiful, too, despite being surrounded by multi-million-dollar houses. We can hear the manatees splashing around the boat after dark, and the flying fish are gigantic. They jump at least three feet in the air and then belly-flop back in the water, and I can never quite believe that I saw them. Today we cleaned and reorganized the whole boat, in preparation for departure, and then went for a sunset row in our little beat-up dinghy. We watched the water change color until it was the same color as the sky, which it always does in the evening when the light angles in the right direction. Then we sat out in the cockpit, sipped glasses of wine, and watched the stars come out. We talked about how crazy people are to not do this when they’re young. We see so many people out here who are 60, 65, 70--they’ve spent their whole lives waiting to retire, to follow their dreams, and then they get out here and are unable to enjoy it anymore. As Wordsworth would say, “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...” I don’t want to lay waste my powers. I’m vigorous, I’m young, and I want to spend my youth watching the stars. It’s a great occupation. It doesn’t pay well, but the benefits are extraordinary.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Port St. Lucie, FL

0 nm

I can’t believe tomorrow’s Easter already. The days have flown by, and it’s another holiday weekend without much special to mark it on the boat. I should have bought a ham or something.

So, the good news: we found out Apple would fix the computer for free, since it’s a hardware defect, we sent it to them on Thursday, and it’s already fixed! If they got it in the mail yesterday, it might already be at Paul’s house. Maybe our luck is changing for the better.

I remain perplexed about whether or not to recommend Apple products. On the one hand, our last iBook was bulletproof. It flew across the cabin in violent seas on more than one occasion, Karl cracked open its case and soldered it back together, and we still had nary a problem with it until it was stolen. On the other hand, we buy two identical laptops on eBay with the exact same defect. Now, Apple repairs it, for free, with fantastic customer service and 24-hour turnaround. Maybe our problem was less buying Apple and more buying computers with a known hardware defect on eBay. If this one arrives in working condition (I’m keeping my fingers crossed) we’ll have a functioning system as well as a full backup system. So we could still get out of this thing.

Our next decision is where to head next. We’re torn between the original plan of the crystal-blue waters of the Bahamas or the bayous and Cajun country of the Gulf Coast. Remaining in the US gives us more (legal) income-generating possibilities, but also less sailing. Then there’s the hurricanes. That’s all I read about these days. According to my reading, we need to keep heading south and east as much as possible, but we really don’t need to worry until August. Maybe we can be to Trinidad by August. Or at least to Martinique.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Manatee Pocket, FL

The good news is that we finally, finally, finally left Daytona. After what turned out to be a month and a half. It was a good stop and everything, it was great to see my family, but it ended up feeling like a big ordeal. So we've had a couple of glorious days of motoring down the Florida ICW--fifty-mile days, gorgeous sunny skies, manatees, dolphins, flamingos, pelicans, perfect aqua water and deserted islands--everything you associate with Florida and crusing and perfection. I'm sunburnt and happy, and I've been handwriting ecstatic posts about how we've finally found our path again and we're exactly in the right place. We even examined our budget and discovered to our astonishment (and a very good tax return) that we have enough money to keep going for another five months, if we tighten our belts a little.

So, the bad news, you may ask? The reason we've been racing down here is to catch up with the second computer we ordered, which was shipped to Karl's dad's friend who works at a marina here along the Saint Lucie River. The guy gave us a seven-day warrantee on the thing, but shipping was a lot faster than we expected and we got here last night--a week to the day from when the computer arrived. And guess what? It doesn't work either.

I'm doing my dead level best to keep a smile on my face, my chin up, my motivation firmly in place, as everyone on the comment boards has been encouraging me too. But if this isn't God's way to tell me to go hiking again, I don't know what it is. Or at least to buy paper charts. But we had to buy paper charts just to get this far, 180 miles down the coast. The cost for the chartkit was $150. We cheated, of course, and just bought the guidebook that had chartlets in it, and have been anchoring on a wing and a prayer, without any depths to guide us. But the guidebook cost $43!! If we have to buy paper charts, we'll probably be out of money in a month! Then again, if we have to keep spending a month and a half and $1000 at every stop to fix and then order a new computer, we'll be out of money in another month, too.

Thanks again for everyone's comments. I'm using the email at the marina office, and we're probably getting kicked out here in a minute. So I'm keeping the smile firmly affixed to my face, though it is requiring significant effort.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Pine Island to Manatee Pocket, FL

36.5 nm
Wind: SE 10-15 knots
Seas: choppy
Maximum speed: 7.2 knots (because of wake)
Average speed: 3.9 knots
Latitude: 27°09.24’N
Longitude: 080°11.78’W

Another month gone. But not misspent, thankfully. It blows my mind that Karl turns thirty--thirty! That’s old!--next month, and that it’s our three-year anniversary before that. Three years with this man whom I love. Three years ago I was tromping along, happy, clueless, on the Appalachian Trail. Who would’ve guessed where I’d end up? It’s all a fairy tale with a happy ending.

We made it to St. Lucie today. It was a little bit of a rough day on the water. The ICW was choppier than usual, and the wind was right in our faces. The motoring is getting to me again. I sit and steer and agonize about using fossil fuels. Sometimes I really believe we should get rid of the diesel. We might die, sure, but at least we wouldn’t be contributing to global warming! And the boat would be blessedly quiet.

We don’t have a bimini cover (a kind of awning) or a spray dodger, so the sun is really hard on Karl. He took a break today and I manned the Master (our autopilot) for a couple of hours, in the sun and spray. The spray is worse, because after about a half-hour whoever’s steering is completely covered in crystallized salt. To the point where it hurts your face to touch it, because it’s like rubbing your skin with sandpaper. A shower would feel great.

The only reason the spray was so bad, though, was because we were going directly into the wind, something the boat is incapable of doing under sail. It’s the best feeling when you cut off the engine and start angling against the wind, feeling the bow of the boat slice through the water. What it boils down to is that a sailboat is designed to sail, wants to sail, begs to sail--when she’s powering, she’s inefficient at best. I can’t wait to be able to sail again.

The wakes today didn’t help either. Blasting through this section of ICW on the weekend was probably a bad idea, especially because we were waked about ten times an hour by million-dollar powerboats out for a weekend jaunt, spraying us with another shower of salt every time. But we’re here now.

Karl called his friend Paul and the computer’s in and we’re going over to his marina tomorrow. The anchorage here is pleasant but shallow, and we’ll probably head out for a burger tonight. We haven’t spent a cent in a week. So might as well splurge. I might even put on makeup!