March 18 20 Three Lay Days in Lake Boca Zero Miles

Lake Boca is a large rectangle of water cut into the west side of the beach strip of Boca Raton, from the Boca Inlet north for about  .4 miles, along the east side of the ICW, .2 miles wide. The center of it is very shallow with only the edges navigable for keel boats. Anchorage for sailboats is in the NE corner. Access to land is in a park with a boat ramp and dinghy dock on the west side of the ICW, just south of the Palmetto Park Boulevard Bridge, north of the lake (less than half a mile away). We will have to request an opening of that bridge when we leave to head north.

Craig had a better idea about where to go ashore, because the tide runs fast under the bridge and big boats go too fast and make wakes: his boat, Sangaris, pictured above, is docked in a canal at the back yard of a private home about a mile further north. He picked us up there and we got to see Sangaris again, after all her European adventures.

Ive been saying that when I get too old to sail ILENE, a radio controlled sailing boat on a lake may be in my future. Well Kathy had to work, Lene did her phone work from Kathy and Craigs house, and Craig took me to another gated community a bit further north called Kings Point, which has a lake in which his club races such boats. Beauties, one meter long, high aspect ratio,with 3/4 of the weight in the keel. The control box is worn on a strap around ones neck and the right thumb controls the rudder by pushing its joy stick left of right, while the left thumb controls both sails with back to pull them closer hauled and forward letting them fly for the downwind legs of the course. Below is Craig, demonstrating and Erwin, also a Past Commodore of the Harlem and racer, to the right.

All I can say is that it is a lot harder than it looks and I lost every race; actually I did not finish them. When aboard a boat you can easily see if your bow is pointed to the right or left of a buoy; you feel the tension of the water on the rudder; you can see how close to the wind you are. But offset by 50 to 100 yards and at a strange angle, these critical facts are not readily apparent at least not yet, to me. And rudder control is maintained by constant pressure of perhaps a half inch on the "tiller". But these things can be learned and the fifteen guys had a good camraderie going. Kathy is one of the guys and quite competitive when she is not working. I raced her boat, number 3. Erwin brought some beer for the "after". We plan to see Erwin again before heading north.

And in the evening we had dinner with not just Craig and Kathy, but also Mike and Janet. The latter have a Florida home and we will see them again at their home in St. Michaels, off the Chesapeake on Marylands Eastern Shore, on our way home. I forget to take their picture but they are pictured from when we visited them in the Chesapeake in 2012 if you want to take a look. A nice Greek restaurant.

We rented a car for one day for trips to cousin Naomi to pick up a late arriving bundle of mail from home, the pet food store, Publix, the automotive store for things for the dink, the post office, the bank and the beach.

On our last day we toured around Mizener Village, which is a ritzy shopping mall. I got some new shorts because none of my old ones are unstained. We had lunch out and saw The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which celebrates India and aging. Good but not as good as the first movie. The theater is called Ipic and does not really want to be in the movie business. Seats are very large and comfortable and $14 if you want to sit in the first two rows, or $24 if you want even more luxurious seats with free use of a pillow and blanket and free popcorn. And Ipic has a full service restaurant and bar that you can patronize before or after and provides delivery of food and drink to your seat during the movie. And no reduced rate for matinees or for seniors.  The staff said it is a "good place to impress your date on a special occasion". The film is apparently just a gimmick to get folks to come in and spend money on the "entertainment experience package". This hustle offends me and I hope it fails, though we were the only two in the sixteen "cheap" seats while perhaps ten people sat behind us. We have had nice warm dry calm weather while in Boca. Next stop: Palm Beach.

Read More..

March 5 10 Six Lay Days in Fort Lauderdale Zero Miles

Dinner at the Downtowner, across the river, under the Andrews Avenue Bridge, outdoors, ten feet from the River, after dark, with great atmosphere, twice. Here from the other side of the river, by day.

Once, just the two of us, and the second time with Craig and Kathy. Their 45 Amel Santorin ketch, "Sangaris", is now back in Florida after they have spent the last fifteen years living aboard, as far away as the Galapagos in the Pacific, and throughout the western Med. Craig is a Past Commodore of the Harlem, now an honorary member. They have more miles under their keel than all the rest of us Harlemites put together. I was pleased to tell him that ILENE is the second most sailed boat in the Club. I raced a few times with Craig and Kathy on their old boat "C-Jack" and learned a lot about how to do this thing. Yelling never helps when things go wrong, as they invariably will. Quick, calm instructions on how to fix the problem is what is needed. We enjoyed some wine etc. aboard before the Downtowner.

We also enjoyed mango-sweet potato pancakes with Lenes HS classmate, Elissa and her husband Len, This was the advance guard of Lenes Lincoln HS class of 67 reunion in Boca Raton next week.

Since we left New York I have been meaning to shorten the length of the strap at the tack of the Genoa, to pull that sail down

about an inch in order to be able to stretch out its luff (front edge) more fully. I think that the sail has simply gotten stretched out a bit during the many years of heavy use so that unless I lowered the bottom, the top would get stuck and interfere with furling. I took advantage of access to the tack of the sail from the dock on a windless morning to do this job, doubling the bottom of the strap back upon itself to create a new loop to shorten it. It was too difficult to force the needle through the tough doubled multi-layered strap, even with the palm. So I used fewer stitches than I had planned and other methods to attempt to achieve this job. Time will tell whether the sewing will be strong enough.

We contacted canvas shops to try to get what Lene has sought since those cold days on the way south -- a cockpit, fully enclosed by clear plastic, which will warm up without the cold wind blowing freely through it. The boat came with five panels of mosquito screening to keep out the prevalent pests in the hot summery months in the Chesapeake, where the original owner kept this boat, then called "La Vie." I put these panels up once, on a rainy day, about eight years ago. So I knew they fit. But they did not keep the rain out, nor the wind. The plan is to use the existing Sunbrella canvas "frames" or "hems" around the outside of the panels, but cut out the screen material and sew in sheets of clear strong plastic. I put the panels up and took measurements and photographs. We sent what we have back to Doyle Sails on City Island who will do the work and send them back to us. Best price plus friendly knowledgeable local work at home.

"La Vie" is a lovely name for a boat, by the way, "The Life". But it was not as good for us as ILENE. It is said to be bad luck to change a boats name, but I have changed the name of each of the three boats I have had. The Pearson 28 went from "Y Knot" to "Just Cause".  The Tartan 34 went from "Alsterwasser" (the favorite beer of the late husband from whose widow we bought her) to "ILENE", as did "La Vie."

Carlos walked the dock, gave me his card and offered to clean and wax the exterior of the boat including the stainless, from the waterline up.  Cleaning is work that I can do, though in hindsight, not as well as Clarence. And though I can do it, I seem to not get around to doing it and  I have never gotten ILENE as clean and shining bright white as Carlos has. She had not been done since last spring. Carlos worked, with power polishers,  the better part of three days, and the money was well spent.

I learned a lot at the New River Hotel, now the history museum, located in the former small modest cinder block hotel beside the former Florida East Coast Railroad depot. The FEC still screams past, many times per day, over that RR bridge, right outside the hotel, but they are freight trains and do not stop at the former passenger depot. There are plans to run passenger trains from Miami to Disneyworld over these same tracks. But there is some opposition to the plan because it would require the RR bridge  to open an additional 30 times per day with the loud train whistle reverberating at one second intervals while the trains pass through the heart of the city.

The train runs near Cooleys Landing, because Flagler couldnt persuade the Brickell family, who owned Broward County, to sell him a right of way closer to the coast. And that is why Flagler did not build his typical Flagler pleasure palace hotel here and this one was built by others. There was indeed a fort here, three of them in fact, one after the other, named after the commander of the first fort, one a Mr. Lauderdale. Most of us think of this place as a beach town, which it certainly is ("Where The Boys Are"), but the town grew up by the New River, where we are, several miles west of the beach. The river got its name, according two two competing legends, either (A) because an earthquake caused an underground stream to rise to the surface, i.e., a new river, or (B) because the mouth of the river kept shifting, causing it appear as a new river each time it was charted. Neither story sounds true to me. Cooley, after whose landing our Marina is named, was a local merchant and Justice of the Peace. He also operated a large facility extracting arrowroot from the roots of a plant he grew. When some drunken settlers killed an Indian, he had the culprits arrested and brought to trial. But he lost the prosecution because his only witnesses were Indians, and they could not testify in 1835. The witnesses were upset and blamed Cooley. Some time later they killed Cooley and his family. Class dismissed.

We prayed on the sabbath with Lenes cousin, Jeff, at Temple Beth Am (house of the people) in Margate.. Jeff is an officer there. The service was in the Conservative tradition, in which I grew up and belonged for the first 30 years of my life. Many of the melodies were familiar to me. The Rabbis sermon was timely and excellent, drawn from an essay whose author he credited.
The current spat between the Prime Minister of Israel and President Obama and Senator Boehner who invited Netanyahu to address Congress without asking Obama, was nothing but a bunch of politicians ALL behaving badly. They all agree that Iran cannot be permitted to get a bomb and that Israels security must be assured.  He traced the history of the U.S. - Israel relationship and showed that it was not a warm one until the 1967 war; that the chief suppliers of arms to Israel until then were first the French and then The Soviets via Chechoslovakia.  But, having failed to pacify Afghanistan or Iran after almost 15 years of trying, the U.S., under Obama, has moved to a policy of requiring the four major powers of the region to buffer each other and balance each other out, with U.S. air strikes providing a bit of assistance, to assist ground troops of the local rivals. The four powers in this regional analysis are Turkey, Israel, Iran and the Saudis, none of which like each other, and all of which have cause to hate ISIS.  The spat between Israel and the U.S. comes from Israels feeling of loss that that they were the favorite of the US.  Yet there are many hawkish right wing Jews in the US who hate our President for many reasons. Jeffs Rabbi is to be commended for not joining them.

 After services we had lunch with Jeff, his brother Alan and their Mom, Naomi, at a Chinese Buffet that Naomi craved. This was her first outing since our December visit, when she was in rehab for a broken pelvis. After eating too much we were driven back to Naomis house to pick up about six packages which we had shipped there and then back home to ILENE, for the rest of the rainy day.

I walked to and on the beach one day, via Las Olas Boulevard. Well, a quarter of the round trip was a ride, from the Post office, where I had walked to send off the screens. to the beach. I passed the art gallery district including Pococks, whose owner, though British, like George Pocock, was not related to that famous builder of cedar rowing shells featured in "The Boys In the Boat." I told him that he would enjoy the book.  On the beach I walked north, past the most crowded spot, called "Beach Place," covered with young bikini clad women and men who desired them, then past a gay section of the beach and finally a much more sparsely blanketed section by the Westin Hotel, featuring older people and families. On the way back, along Las Olas ("The Waves"), I noticed the towns logo: a boat with a spinaker on the bow and a phoenix or rising sun as the main.

I walked past the ends of the many canals that were dredged to Las Olas Blvd. and visited an open house in this almost completed new 7488 square foot home. It can be yours for less than $7M. Nice spot to dock ILENE comes with it. But not for us.

We had wine and then dinner aboard with my only nephew, David, who this lousy under-lit photo does not do justice, sorry Dave. He lives with his lovely wife and two kids in Atlanta where he has a business, but is also a partner in a business in Boca Raton and works here three days (two night) per week. He had a weekend with his father aboard "Just Cause" back in 1996, from City Island to Northport and back, but had never seen ILENE. 
We have several more days here in Fort Lauderdale.

Read More..

March 17 Fort Lauderdale to Boca Raton 17 Miles

We got help from our neighbors in bringing in our dock lines, exactly at 9 am, the earliest opening of the New River bridges after the blocked-out morning rush hours. On the way down the New one large boat leapfrogged with us and later told us that he had stopped at a dock to let off a passenger. After the four bridges over the New, which open on request, we passed eight more that open only at fixed times, on request. We missed one, because we miscalculated the time/distance/speed relationship, and because Lene wanted to arrive "on time". But the bridge tenders want us to hurry up, arrive early and wait. So we had half an hour to kill, because of missing that opening.  We passed The Ocean Monarch, the one on the left, where my parents lived and my daughters enjoyed vacation days, its balconies looking north and over the sea.

We arranged to let Elissa know when we were passing her house so we could wave to each other. Thats Lene standing on the port side, outside the cockpit, waving.

Lots of big houses along the way; I shot only a few. So much money down here. Nobody "needs" such a big house. Many are empty, maintained to impress ones friends and colleagues when one chooses to visit Florida.

We dropped the hook in Lake Boca at 1:30 pm and after lowering the dink, got to a dock on the west side of the ICW, just south of the Palmetto Park Bridge, by 3:15. There Kathryn met us by car, took us shopping and then to her and Craigs beautiful home in Boca Lago, another of those gated communities for those 55-and-over that abound in this region. A great home cooked meal, lots of sailing talk. Craig is so handy; he can fix anything on a boat and renovated their house by himself, carpentry, plastering, plumbing, electrical, tile work, electronics and painting. And they play a mean piano and are superb racers.
Another thing: we are so ungrateful; for months we were complaining about the weather, too cold, too rainy, too windy, etc. But having enjoyed several week of ideal weather with nothing but more of the same in the forecast for the next week, we forget to give thanks and express our gratitude. or even  to mention it.
And I have finally found a good home for "The Lighthouse Robinsons", reviewed in this blog, which was a gift from Judy. Kathy and Craig are not only sailors, but of Scottish ancestry, so Im sure they will enjoy the book.
I would say we enjoyed a quiet night aboard and this is true as far as the wind was concerned, but false in that someone partied very loudly until 3:30 am, a drunken screaming woman disturbing the peace. The first episode of this on this trip.

Read More..

March 27 29 Final Lay Day in Stuart Passage to Fort Pierce and Three Lay Days There 26 2 Miles

Lene had business to transact by phone so I dinked in alone and took the free shuttle to Westmarine to get a new dinghy painter and a new anchor snubber -- and got neither.
As to the painter, we do not tow the dink so a sturdier painter that floats (so as to not get into the boats propeller when we are in reverse) is not needed; we can simply use the one that came with the dink.
The need for a new snubber line arose because the old one was getting shorter and thinner. After being anchored for a long time during strong winds, it takes either patience with the marlinspike or just cutting off the last nine inches to undo the snubber where it is clove hitched to the anchor chain. This has happened several times and the line was getting progressively shorter. Also it was getting thinner, because of severe chafing. So time for a new one. You want this line to stretch so most of the lines we have aboard are not good for this purpose because they were made for other purposes, where you want the lines to NOT stretch. So Im looking at Westmarines selection of lines and -- wait a minute! I have an old soft stretchy nylon anchor rode. If I cut off a 25 foot length, this will work quite well with lots of line left for cutting off nine inches at a time over the next several years. But, I spent $100 on a good hardened stainless lock to prevent theft of the outboard from the dink.
Back at the dock, I installed the lock and hacked off another half foot of the tiller extender because it extended too far. The marinas bike took me the five minute ride to the local, less upscale Publix for two items Lene wanted.
Heading out back to ILENE, a terrible thing happened. In driving the dink at the dock, I bounced it off another dink into one of the concrete pilings, from which clam shells extended out like razors. WHOOSH! was the sound of the air escaping from a 1.5 inch gash, below the waterline in the port aft tube. Our almost brand new dink, wounded already! Are we destined to be cursed with dinghy problems? The dink can stay afloat with only one of its three tubes inflated, so is in no danger of sinking, but this was a most revolting development.
I hauled the dink up onto the Martinas dinghy dock and water that had entered the tube, which was quite flabby, poured out. The marina gave me a ride back to ILENE for the repair kit, sandpaper, and a pair of scissors to shape the patch into a diamond shape with rounded corners. You have to sandpaper both surfaces and mix a two part glue and apply it to the dink and the patch. I needed help in the form of tools from the marina office to open the two glue bottles. You have to use a metal or glass container to mix the two parts of the glue, hopefully in the correct nine to one proportions. the bottom of a beer can from a trash bin was the metal surface and its tab was the stirrer. I let the glue get tacky but not as long as the instructions called for, and slapped it into place as the first few drops of torrential rain hit. I let it cure for over two hours while reading in the Marinas clubhouse -- free popcorn!  Then I drove the dink back to the boat, without inflating the tube in question to full pressure. The instructions say to not pressure test the patch for 24 hours.  Well the patch did not fall off, but it has a fast "slow leak" requiring it to be pumped up each 24 hours. So we will try to have the job done by a professional in St. Augustine in a few days. My not so handy work:

The passage to Fort Pierce was not long. But with temperatures in the low 50s, a hard, cold 30 knots of apparent wind 20 degrees off the port bow made for quite a wind chill factor. (Yes, I know, I shouldnt be complaining to northern friends who have suffered a cruel winter.) But it makes us fear that we may have started north too soon. Anyway, hats, gloves and scarves were in order. Just a slog under grey skies. Not a peak sailing experience, in fact solely a motoring experience.

The Fort Pierce Municipal Marina has been redone since our charts were printed, after a hurricane took out much of the old marina. They spent a lot of money to build a series of barrier islands to prevent such damage. The new slips are almost ready for occupancy and we went to the remaining portion of the old, via a well marked but tricky new channel that is not on the charts yet. The tricky part is the current, which runs wicked strong N-S across the E-W channel. We had to go west but headed NW to "crab" through it diagonally. They put us starboard side to, on the outside "T" dock, opposite the fuel dock, so when we leave we make a "U" turn to port and our lines are set up for fueling.

The Marina is different from others in our experience in that a number of live-aboarders have cats rather than dogs. Playmates for our dynamic duo, but they grew up playing with each other, our pair get low grades in "playing well with others."

We arrived too late for the "biggest farmers market in Florida" but wandered through a large music festival on our way to the marina office: rock, blues, country, etc. Crowds were still arriving; we were serenaded that night. Normally, readers know, we explore a town and learn of its history, etc. But here we just hung out with friends. Janet and Mike, with whom we had dined on Greek food in Boca, invited us to their home for happy hour and took us to Publix on our way home the first evening there and to their home where Kathryn and Craig had come up from Boca to visit, the next. After this second happy hour we went out to the Second Street Cafe for dinner.

                          Kathryn, Craig, Lene, Roger, Mike and Janet

We hope to meet up with Janet and Mike in Oxford Maryland on our way home. Its amazing. We last saw them in Maryland in 2012 and Kathryn and Craig at her brothers wedding maybe six years ago. But put sailors together and the old bonds are re-cemented instantly-- a lot stronger than the two part glue fixing our Hypalon patch to the dink. Mike and Janet just moved into their new, large modern apartment facing east over the water on the fourth floor.

Rear view from entrance

We are amazed at how much home one can get here for such a reasonable price. If we were in the market for another home, we would be very tempted. We missed both of the distinguished visitors who were here with us: President Obama came to play golf and Jay Leno was in town for a performance with $85 and $115 tickets.

Front view, with Atlantic past the barrier island.

View to the left, with free anchoring where we will stay next time.

Read More..

March 30 April 2 Fort Pierce to Cocoa and Three Lay Days There 57 Miles

We left the fuel dock at 8 am and anchored at 4:45. Lots of miles but all high bridges except one which opened on request. We went past Vero Beach and Dragon Point, where we had stayed on our way south. This was just as pleasant a passage as the one to Fort Pierce had been ugly. The ICW is deeper, wider and straighter for the most part, and it was sunny and warmer.
A pod of porpoises looked us over while crossing close behind us; we havent seen them for a while. When the tide turned, slowing us from near seven knots to 6.2, the wind came up, just far enough off our starboard bow to allow the small jib to get that speed back for us. We had planned to go outside in the Atlantic to New Smyrna, but the problem with the sunken barge in the Fort Pierce Inlet coupled with winds out of the north made the decision to stay inside until New Smyrna for us -- three passages instead of one.

In the morning the tachometer was not working, nor the engine hour meter. I took off and cleaned the plexiglass cover that protects the panel and the panel itself and jiggled the wires. Jiggling sometimes helps such problems, but no luck today. Then Lene said she had trouble with the ignition switch when turning on the engine. Oh yes, she had accidentally turned it to "Off". After "Start" it should be left "On", but turning it "Off" does not stop the engine -- it only turns off the electricity to its instruments. Switched back to "On" and the tachometer was instantly restored to operation.

A big pleasant surprise when I heard a yell of  "Roger" and saw a dark blue motorized catamaran passing us.

"Its Phat Cat," came next. Dave and Diane, with their two cats aboard, passed us. They resigned from the Harlem and are currently on their last leg (northbound up the Atlantic coast) of the "Great Circle Cruise". They started up the Hudson, and then through canals to the Great Lakes and Canada, down Lake Michigan, the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee and other rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, through the ICW east and south along Floridas west coast to Marathon and then northbound in the Atlantic.  This is a trip for power boats; our mast would have to be taken down for the trip, and laid atop the boat, would extend ILENE from 43 feet long to over 65. Dave and Di have been on the journey for about ten months. Since Marathon, they have been in many of the same places we were, but neither of us knew it and we had not met up until now. Their boats name is not on the boat and I might not have recognized it if they had not called out.

We recalled a wild Harlem Memorial Day Rendezvous near Ellis Island in NY Harbor. We had rafted up to Phat Cat and then another smaller sailboat rafted up to our other side and get her mast caught under our back stay. Several men got on top of Phat Cats roof and pulled down to the side on the other boats main halyard to free her. And again, during a Club Cruise, we enjoyed a good time with Dave and Di in Watch Hill, RI.

Phat Cat is a Lagoon 43, built in France, the same length as ILENE but twice as wide, so they have lots of room. It can be rigged with a mast and sails but Phat Cat is not.

The aft stateroom can be divided by a bulkhead down the middle to make two large staterooms if it is used for chartering; but Phat Cat has one immense stateroom, shown here with one of its two cats, Xena or Cassie, reclining on the queen size bed.  She goes faster than us and when we caught up we anchored near her at Cocoa Village, off to the west of the ICW in ten feet of water with 50 feet of snubbed chain.

Dave put down their dink and ferried us around the first night and the next two days that they stayed with us here, before moving on. We had not planned to stay here so long but the nearest place that can do a professional patch on our dink is in St. Augustine and they will not have time to do our job until April 7, so we have slowed down our itinerary to arrive there when they can do the work which will take two days.

We dined on Thai food with Dave and Di at Thai Thai our first night, a pot luck aboard their large boat the second and blueberry pancakes on ILENE the morning of their departure.

Lene making herself at home on Phat Cats back porch.

Dining room with nav station in background

Dave and I dinked across the Indian River to its eastern side where it was a short walk to the local Publix, less than half a mile. The four of us "shopped" Cocoa Village, right by our free dinghy dock, one afternoon. Lene got two pairs of shoes, Dave and Di enjoyed some excellent pastries from the bakery, and we toured Travis hardware, a famous old fashioned place with a huge inventory including tools for use on ocean liners. We bought a better lock to secure the dink to the shore or to the boat,   We are not far from Cape Canaveral where Disney Cruise ships put in with their thousands of passengers. One of the excursions is to take busloads of tourists to Cocoa Village for shopping.

When Dave and Di headed north, we took our dink across to Merrit Island so Lene could get her fix of supermarket shopping. I went back to Travis for a stainless steel snubber hook to replace the rusty mess that we had aboard, and "spline" rubber to affix the new cat proof screening into the frames of the side screens which had been scratched through. I also visited the bank and the Florida Historical society.

They have a good free dinghy dock at Cocoa Village, where one can tie up fore and aft to keep the dink away from the pilings and use the lock amidships to avoid theft. And you can see the shortened tiller extender sticking up, imagine before I cu 18 inches from it!
Lene got a message, her first on this trip, and after dinner at Murdocks,

(southern cuisine --  delicious and inexpensive) we attended the local production of My Fair Lady at the Cocoa Village Historic Playhouse.






And what a treat! The house holds 600. Eliza Doolittle was a sixteen year old. The actors were great and in the choral numbers 48 of them were on stage, supported by an orchestra of sixteen musicians. The costumes and sets were excellent and one would have paid five times as much to see this show on Broadway. Professor Higgins is such a misogynist and yet even today the story is great because the show makes fun of him for it.

Read More..

March 4 Belle Island Anchorage Miami Beach to Cooleys Landing Marina Ft Lauderdale 35 6 Miles

An interesting passage. We pulled up the anchor at 9:45. The tide was helping us on the way out of Miami. The main ship channel was free of  cruise liners (on Wednesday) so we were able to use that channel without the police directing us to turn back, and requiring the more circuitous industrial route We had only one tow and barge to avoid.

But the wind was in our face and once we got to Government Cut proper, big rollers from the sea were coming directly in. Built up by ten to twenty knots of wind from the east or south east, over a long time and distance, those waves confronted the tide flowing out and produced waves up to ten feet high which tossed ILENE about. Our bow dove under some waves with salt water bathing the deck. Good thing the hatches were not just closed but dogged down very tight. we closed the companionway hatch cover just in case, but no salt water came that far back to enter the cabin. And when our bow was lifted high up by other waves, a few gallons of seawater entered the cockpit through the stern swim platform but drained quickly back out. The sails, our strong engine, could not be deployed to get us through this bad patch faster because the wind was in our faces. We do not give the kitties big breakfasts on such days and their crying was not from nausea but caused by fear and discomfort.
Once clear of the Cut and its extending sea walls we turned north, and put out the small jib and things stabilized a bit. But we were still close to the wind and only making 4.5 knots; not enough to get to our destination in time. So we changed to the genoa and with the wind now on or near our beam we made seven knots, on a rolly ride with five foot waves pushing on our starboard quarter. But at seven knots we were now going too fast -- we would get there too early. We had to arrive at our destination, a few miles up the New River, at 4 pm, when it would be slack tide. If we were earlier or later, the strong tidal flows in that river would make it difficult to get into the slips which lie perpendicular to the tidal flow. So about an hour before the waypoint marking our turn west into the Port Everglades Cut to Fort Lauderdale, we switched back to the small jib and slowed  back down to four knots.  We were also happy to have the self tacking small jib out because the turn to the west would involve a jibe. We had planned for the 3:30 opening of the 17th Street Bridge across the ICW in Ft. Laud, but sailing with just the small jib until a few hundred yards from the bridge, we still got there too early, and made the 3;00 opening. Better too early, which can be solved by slowing down, that too late, because there is a limit on how fast we can speed up.

This is someone elses idea of beauty and is big and probably fast and unusual in design and color and parked near Steven Spielbergs mega yacht that is pictured in the post from our early spring 2012 visit to this city.

So we had to slow down and solved this by drifting north in the ICW in neutral and maintained steerage  with the wind and tide until we turned left into the New River. We had a scare when we heard on the radio from a friendly power boat of New Yorkers that the railroad bridge, one of the four we passed under, was down for maintenance; it is normally up and out of the way except when a train comes. That would completely screw up our timing issue. But it went up again, just in time, and we had an easy landing and were all tied up by 4:15, talked with our new neighbors, took showers, a delicious steak dinner aboard and tried, without success, to watch Downton Abbey via WiFi.

Cooleys Landing and Marathon are both municipal marinas in Florida but they have diametrically opposite pricing policies to influence the length of ones stay. At Marathon they give a bargain price to those who stay long term. One night on a mooring at the monthly rate is only ten dollars, which is less than the price of dinghy docking and restroom use on a daily rate for those on anchor. Here in Fort Lauderdale we pay only $1 per foot per day for dockage with the BoatUS discount, but only for ten calendar days per calendar year, after which 20% higher rates apply. Here they incent short term stays unlike Marathon which favors those who stay for the long haul. We are peripatetic nomads and have never stayed on our boat anywhere for a month.

Read More..

March 21 22 Lake Boca to the North Palm Beach Marina and Lay Day There 31 Miles 12 Bridges

We hauled our anchor at 7:15 for the 7:30 opening of our first bridge and motored all the way, tying up port side to, at this lovely marina at 2 pm. More mega houses (but this is not a real estate blog) and in Palm Beach, we saw the largest aggregation of mega yachts in one place since St. Maarten. This is another of the places where very wealthy people congregate. There is a boat show next week and this may have attracted some of the BIG boats. The last of the bridges, the Flagler Memorial in Palm Beach, was the site of the most congestion I have ever seen at a bridge: about thirty boats, half going north and half south, were traffic jammed near the bridge before its opening, trying to get through, one at a time, in the ten minutes that the tender allowed for the scheduled opening. We spent most of the passage with s/v Elle & I, from Vermont, a 35 foot Beneteau or Jeaneau. Alas, we never exchanged contact information with her people.

We missed one opening which cost us half an hour, because of my confusion. I made a list of the bridges, in consecutive order, with their names (because they wont answer your call unless you call them by name). I also figured out the distance between the bridges and the times between their openings such as some on the hour and half while others at 15 and 45 minutes after the hour. Most of the bridges open at such fixed times but some open on request. But some tenders try to accommodate boaters by delaying the opening for a few minutes while fast boats cool their heels, in order to let slower boats catch up, so both can get through with one opening and less disruption of automobile traffic. We were the beneficiaries of this practice at one bridge and the victims of it at another. These delays make it almost impossible to plan your speed between bridges since the time is shortened, but the distance is not.
North Palm Beach Marina was dredged out of the west side of the ICW and enjoys decent wifi and the best restrooms we have seen on this trip -- large, marbled, each with a large shower stall that does not drain into the drying area, a bench, lots of hooks and plenty of flow of hot water.
We had dinner at the restaurant of the marina with Erwin.

He has been such a huge help to me ever since I joined the Harlem in 1990 --Wow, that 25 years ago! The list of favors is so long that I couldnt include it here. But we talked about several of the prominent ones over dinner, including the time he spent two days taking the head off the Atomic-4 gas engine of my first boat, machining the surface smooth again and reinstalling it with gasket, all just days before a two week Club Cruise. He said he would help me but in fact he did the work and I handed him tools. Erwin was Commodore of the Club for an unprecedented two terms, organizes fund raisers for the club and the annual weeks charter in the BVIs, is an accomplished Bermuda racer and a master engineer, mechanic and designer of boating things and breweries. We had a lovely and lively dinner with him before he drove us back to ILENE.
Our lay day here was just that. We did a cursory washdown of the topsides and a shopping trip to Publix (with a stop at a discount hardware store - I would have spent a lot more there but most of the tools did not say "stainless"). We went via the marinas free taxi service. Other than that I didnt do much of anything but loll around.
On our way south we went outside from the Lake Worth Inlet at North Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale, in a single day sail. But heading north we traversed a new part (for me) of the ICW with a stop at Lake Boca, and it took two passage days.

Read More..

March 11 16 Six More Lay Days in Fort Laud Zero Miles

Well, we got the 9 dinghy changed to the 9 6" model and Lene is much happier. An amazing number of small tasks were required for this but it is all done, except paying the taxes, getting a registration number and putting it on the boat.

The Doel-fin stabilizer fins are screwed onto the small horizontal fins of the outboard, under the water, extending their area several times. Without them, when we try to go fast, the stern of the dinghy just digs in lower and the bow higher, which uses a lot of fuel, inefficiently, for a slow ride. But the ones that we got first were a bit too big and would not safely fit onto the outboard. So when we had a rented car for a day we got the right ones and during Lenes HS reunion, Janets husband, Ed, helped me install them. And I needed his help because my initial plan to stand the outboard up against a square garbage bin, with the engines vertical downward fin between the boards of the boardwalk and a line holding the outboard to the receptacle failed. The holes that needed to be drilled through the aluminum fins could not be drilled from the top down because the other parts of the outboard interfered with a vertical hole from the drill and the "vise" I had created was too low to the ground to drill the holes from the bottom up. So plan B was to find a taller receptacle to hang the outboard from -- and it worked. They said it was a fifteen minute job; more like 75. And this was definitely a two man job, if only to lift the engine from the dink to the land. Thanks Ed, for your help and for lunch at the Riverside Market Cafe, after. What a jumping place that is! I was not only the oldest person in the joint, but probably at least twice the age of every other person except Ed. They have an interesting way of selling beer: huge cooler cases line a wall with racks of bottles of beer of very many brands. Take what you want, open your bottle with an opener that hangs from the ceiling on a string nearby, and bring your empties to the cash register with your food check to be charged for both.

I treated the dinks hypalon exterior surface with a rubbing with Aerospace Protectant 303, to keep it clean and supple. And we had a spare tiller extender (so one can control the throttle and steering from a position more forward in the dink) which only needed  me to remove the rubber liner so it was large enough to fit properly over the end of the tiller and hack off about a foot to shorten the extender.
I also rebedded the side opening port above my head in the Pullman berth. When it rained I was rewarded by a slow drip on my head (or pillow) of fresh rainwater that seeped in (until I put a pot under the drip to catch it; but living with pots in ones bed is no way to live). All I had to do was remove the six screws that fastened the stainless collar around the outside of the exterior of the port, scrape away all of the old bedding material (rubbery stuff) from the back of the collar and from the surface to which it attaches, squeeze out a bead of new caulking all the way around, place the collar back on, screw the six screws in tight, and then wipe away all the excess I could and, after waiting for it to set, scrape away the remainder of the excess.

We enjoyed a visit to the Art Museum with Lenes HS classmate, Elissa, who is a member. It featured a lecture by a PhD art historian on photography followed by a viewing of the Museums three exhibits: photography, Frieda Kahlo + Diego Rivera, and William Glackens, who was a painter in his own right but is more famous for buying most of the art that is now in The Barnes Collection in Philadelphia for Mr. Barnes. Then Lene and Elissa had dinner with some Lincoln HS grads and I spent a quiet night at home.

Interesting things have been happening at our Marina. 1). A week before we got here an auto was pulled from the bottom of the river, having rolled down the boat ramp next to us. The person whose body was found inside was a crime victim, an accident victim or a suicide. 2) A burglar, running from the police, jumped aboard a sailboat two boats away from ours, and when the husband was awakened by his heavy breathing, jumped into the river and was arrested by the police, waiting on the other shore. Glad it was not our boat. And this is a very cute little strange watercraft, taken out at the boat ramp near us.

Wildlife too: 1). I was afraid, returning to ILENE one night, that one of the kitties was thrashing in the water with one of the big black Moscovy ducks that live in the marina and fear no man -- or cat.

But it was two ducks mating, a very violent squawking while thrashing, it seemed to me. 2). Lene screamed! She does this when insects appear. It is very unsettling. This time it was a gecko crawling on our galley stove. It took a few attempts before I grabbed him and he was happy to be placed back on the dock. The next one was brought to the boat by one of the cats and I put him back ashore but without a good part of his tail. I dont know if he can live without it.  

We were taken to the Wakodahatchee wetlands preserve by our friends, Dick and Elle where we saw a turtle,

lots of birds

and this somewhat larger waterborne gecko, tail first and then head.

 It is part of a water treatment plant and a two mile boardwalk has been erected above the water to give visitors access to the animals. Im thinking it is misnamed because it is not part of a river and "hatchee" is the Native American word for River, as in Caloosahatchee. Dick and Elle showed us their lovely home in the gated 800 single family home community of Valencia Isles. A beautiful home with room for Dicks woodworking tools. They were in the community production of Fiddler On The Roof, Elle operating a camera to project the play onto large screens at each side of the stage in the auditorium or ballroom of the clubhouse and Dick was a stage hand and had used his woodworking skills to fashion a very realistic looking fiddle out of a block of wood. They had invited us for the performance.We had pizza with them before the show and played in the billiard room of their clubhouse while they got ready for the play. It was very well done with retirees playing all the roles including Tevyas five young daughters. An amateur production but not at all amateurish, with professional equipment and a director.

We had a good dinner with Cousin Naomi

and her sons, Alan and Jeff, at Foxy Browns restaurant. It was within walking distance but had a free parking lot so we drove. Naomi still uses a walker after recovery from her broken bone. Rather interesting food and not too expensive.

Lene had a rather full scale course of beauty treatments in anticipation of the full reunion with her class of 67 schoolmates. Not since October, so she deserved it.

We rented a car for a day from Gold Coast Autos, a very efficient operation which picked us up and dropped us of in a timely fashion. Family run for several decades, exclusively from one Fort Lauderdale office. The only bad part relates to the easy pass system they have installed in the cars. If you take a toll road (and who knew it was a toll road) the device automatically pays your toll and you are billed $6.75 if you tell them, or $20 when they find out if you dont tell them.

While we had the car, on a Saturday, I tried to visit my fathers grave. Many Jewish cemeteries are closed on Saturdays so I called the day before and was told that while the office was closed, visitors were allowed until 3 pm. But when we arrived, the gates were locked so all I could do was say my prayers and think my thoughts from inside the car outside the gates. A disappointment.

Having not filled the propane tank since the day of our first arrival in Marathon, we took it for refill at UHaul the day we had the car. The can was almost bone dry. The valve at the top would not open so UHaul could not put in propane. At Westmarine the salesman told us that they do not sell nor install such valves but Boyes Propane does, and they did, and refilled the tank. They also inspected the tank (looked for pitted surfaces indicating corrosion of the exterior surface) and certified the can for another five years. Luckily this happened when we had the car, though our boat, UHaul, Westmarine and Boyes were all within a couple of miles of each other.

Elissa and Len introduced us to their sailing friends, Ned and Carolyn,

who have a 42 foot Jeanneau in Maine and a 36 foot sailboat at Dinner Key down here. Ned is the brother of Gene, who is a member of the Harlem! It is a small world indeed. After some wine aboard the six of us went to dinner at Nicos where I had the largest stuffed artichoke I have ever seen. It may have been partly because of all the sea stories but I blame the fact that I was still eating artichoke after all the others had finished on the size of that choke.  A fun evening and we thank Elissa and Len, who are not sailors,  for enduring all of our sea stories. And we are invited to Ned and Carolyns house in Rockport, Maine on our next trip up there in 2016.

My final afternoon in Fort Lauderdale was a visit to the Science Museum here on Riverwalk. Lenes business has picked up a bit so she was working. I regret to say that the place was somewhat lackluster.

Read More..