After our late spring return to the USA, we were very fortunate to have many things fall right into place. Paul’s company hired him back for seasonal work in Miami. My job also was able to take me back for 50% remote work, though a communication mishap meant I accidentally got to have the summer off, and I didn’t return to work until October. With Paul’s 10-days-on-4-days-off schedule, we had an epic summer and fall which included:
-trips “home” to both PA and TN
-a cruise ship to Cuba (it’s amazing, you should go)
-my 10-year college reunion
-scuba diving wrecks in the Florida Keys
-diving with sharks and 300-lbs goliath groupers in West Palm Beach
-spotting way too many gators and crocodiles in the Everglades
-hiking and hot springs with friends in Utah
-trying lots of new Cuban and Peruvian food
-bicycling from Florida’s East Coast to West Coast
-and exploring Miami with Paul’s awesome coworkers.
We are not taking our good fortune for granted!
Paul’s job ended two weeks earlier than expected, and by early November, we found ourselves in Indiantown Marina with the boat in the work yard. Our goal was to depart for the Bahamas around the 1st week of December.
Major projects on the table included bottom paint, fridge expansion, and repairing damaged topside paint under our rub rail. It only took a day or two to start to overwhelm Paul with boat projects – especially with me still working a job. But I pointed out to him how this was so different from our days in Maryland, where we would watch the powerboaters go out to play while we slaved away with paint brushes. Here in Indiantown, there were over 50 other boats in the work yard, full of people just like us to banter with about problems and ideas! At last, acres of people willing to subject themselves to physical, mental and chemical abuse. Kindred spirits!
We were lucky to meet a lot of awesome people in the boat yard – mostly Canadians, as they seem to be 75% of the marina’s population. Apparently they don’t do well with cold either! After listening to so many other people’s stories of traveling the world by boat, motorcycle, train, or with kids in tow, we started to feel like we’ve done zilch in comparison! (Paul says this is a great feeling because we didn’t come this far to come this far: We came to go a whole lot further.)
Other than the mosquitoes and no-see-ums, Indiantown is not so bad. Though the food choices are limited (3 taco trucks, a BBQ joint, and a few others of similar varieties), it’s really pretty good and pretty cheap. The marina staff are all super nice and two of the guys even live on site and are always up for drinks in the evening. During the week of Thanksgiving, the marina hosted 4 nights of parties with free food and drink!
As our boat work progressed, we realized we weren’t going to be in the water “on time” and pushed our launch back a week. By the time we had launched we had:
-painted the bottom and put on new zincs
-removed the rub rail, repaired the paint under it, and reattached it (with the help of friends)
-turned our fridge into a freezer/fridge spillover, nearly doubling the storage size
-replaced an aluminum plate on the windlass
-painted/ziptied length indicators on the anchor chain
-installed the brand new Mantus anchor
-applied Cetol to most of the teak
-repainted the bowsprit and hatches
-installed a second bilge pump, which allows us to actually use the sink in the head
That list doesn’t seem big enough for 5 weeks of working every day! But believe me each of those projects involved ridiculous amounts of tedious sanding, drilling, cutting, painting, fiberglassing, or wiring that would drive anyone mad.
It was around this time that we began to realize our friends who might cross the Gulf Stream with us were not available, and we began to discuss the possibility of Paul’s parents Dave and Naomi tagging along – his parents were thrilled that, in theory, this would mean spending Christmas in the Bahamas with us. But they weren’t aware of the #1 rule of visiting someone’s boat – “You can pick the time or the place, but not both!”
Once we launched, the stress of trying to make a pre-Christmas crossing happen set in. When we tested the engine, Paul easily fixed the seized starter – but then just as easily broke a hose barb on the engine’s cooling system. Removing the broken hose barb led to the discovery of some near-tragic carbon build-up, which turned out to have an easy fix discovered only after a solid half hour of intense cursing. After paying a lot of money for overnight-Saturday-delivery for the replacement part, the wrong part arrived, causing a 4-day delay. After tripling our previous record for money spent on groceries in a single day, the larger fridge seemed to be struggling to cool, and Paul was so worried sick about it that we had several 2 a.m. fridge temperature-taking parties. Well, he did at least I mostly tried to sleep through it. One day, when we were still on the brink of possibly leaving by Christmas if the weather cooperated and we didn’t break anything else, I asked Paul how he had been feeling that day.
“Pretty terrible,” he said.
“Me too. I’ve had a constant, overwhelming feeling of dread,” I replied. I’ve felt nervous many times in my life but never had I felt this type of stomach-twisting, heavy-chested anxiety caused by the dread of potentially being at fault for cancelling Christmas on parents.
Another relevant sailing saying is “The most dangerous thing on a boat is a schedule” – though I think this is supposed to refer to dangerous weather, not dangerous levels of stress!
We had been watching a potential weather window the Sunday before Christmas, but when the forecast showed that opportunity would no longer come to fruition, a wave of relief washed over. Sure, it sucked that we wouldn’t be spending Christmas in the Bahamas or with our parents, but this also meant we didn’t have to rush to Miami in high winds to attempt staging for that Sunday.
We sat out several days of bad weather in Indiantown Marina, before departing on a nice and sunny December 22. The next week ended up being amazing! We anchored across from Stuart where our friends from Indiantown Catherine and Stefan were hanging out. We explored the market, boardwalk and downtown section of Stuart – this was a fun change of pace since we tend to get off the boat for exploration very infrequently when in the US.
A few days later we anchored in West Palm Beach, where friends we’d made in the Bahamas, Susan and Jeremie, were hanging out. It was wonderful to be reunited with them! We had Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day drinks with them. Paul’s local extended family picked us up for the family Christmas dinner and gift exchange, which was delicious and fun.
Catherine and Stefan anchored next to us a few days later. Paul’s coworker Richie and his wife were vacationing nearby and stopped by to see the boat and have lunch. WPB is street after street of cool shops and restaurants, plus has a free dock and free trolley. It was an awesome place to explore with friends. Shout out to WPB for being our favorite spot to be stuck in Florida!
After we left WPB, we headed to Lauderdale and then on to Miami. You never really know what you are going to encounter on the ICW. We saw many manatees, mansions decorated for Christmas, jumping eagle rays, a jumping shark, and even a captain wearing a t-shirt but no pants and no underwear! Miami was pure insanity as it took our comparatively slow sailboat hours to get passed the area where literally thousands of powerboats party on the weekend.
The channel was very narrow in several areas with shallow spots, just outside the channel. We ran aground once and heard the crunch of scraping bottom against gravel, but a water taxi wake gave us enough water to power off the shallow spot immediately. We got held up at the last bridge and ended up traversing downtown Miami at night – this was fairly terrifying as there is a ton of boat traffic, confusing parts of the charts, and many shallow spots. The auto routing feature on the Navionics app was a lifesaver as far as helping us quickly find a viable route.
New Years Eve was spent at a fuel dock somewhere in Biscayne Bay – we had called twice before showing up but they didn’t mention they were closing early, so we spent the night there after checking in with the police officer and security guard. We celebrated the New Year by taking outdoor showers at the adjacent county park and cooking up steaks. We also managed to get an oil change in. Luckily we could see the 10pm fireworks perfectly from our boat because Paul was on antibiotics and didn’t feel like getting up for the midnight show.
Our final few days in Miami were spent at Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove. We picked up a mooring ball – for the first time, on the first try, with no yelling! (Side note: we’ve decided there is no yelling on our boat… just speaking loudly with love!) Over 4 days, we ran errands, had dinner with my summer sailing buddy, bought packing peanuts to reduce the size of our functional but power-hungry fridge, ate a lot of Sushi Maki and carefully watched the weather. In a consultation with forecaster Chris Parker, he said he had enough confidence in the weather that we could give Paul’s parents the go-ahead to start their 2-day journey from Knoxville to Miami. “It’s time!” we excitedly told them as we knew these couple weeks of waiting felt twice as long.
Paul’s parents arrived the afternoon of the 4th. They stayed in a hotel and caught the 8am marina shuttle to our boat the next morning. Unlike the nights prior to our previous crossings, I slept through the night and woke up feeling fresh! The forecasted storms had already passed, so we untied the lines and were motoring across Biscayne Bay by 8:40.
When we hit the Atlantic late morning, the West wind was in full force and we raised the sails. When the Gulf Stream current started pushing us, the boat was making 7-9 knots! The wind clocked north – you may hear advice to “never” cross the Gulf Stream with a north wind, but in reality this depends on the strength of the wind. The forecast said the wind would back up to West, but this never happened. After 4-5 hours of sailing, the wind died out and the seas had reached 5+ feet – the boom clanged while I tried to find an angle that would work, and a few of the slides on the mainsail broke. We decided keeping sails up was pointless, and we started motoring more directly East to Moselle bank. Between the current and dodging a cargo ship, we were already a bit north of our waypoint and would have to make up the ground when we were closer to the Bahamas.
We motored through the night, switching off in 4-6 hours shifts, Paul with Naomi and me with Dave. Between experience, scopolamine, and getting a good night’s rest, this was the most comfortable stream crossing yet for me, even with not quite reaching the “flow” of steering in the waves that I had mastered the last time. The lights of Bimini were in sight before 9 PM, and we soon crossed onto the banks where it’s only 10-60 feet deep. We saw a lot of cargo ships through the night, ensuring we were staying awake. Shortly before sunrise, Paul woke me to raise the sails as we were making only 2 knots under motor. I raised the main.
“Weird, that didn’t help at all!” Paul said. “Where are we, the Bermuda triangle?!” (Actually, yes….). I raised both foresails and we sped up to 4 knots. The wind helped us almost the rest of way until the final couple hours when it shifted completely East and we couldn’t sail directly into it.
Thirty-four hours and 131 miles after we left the marina, we were setting our anchor next to Great Harbour Cay, Berry Islands, Bahamas! Free again at last…
