We have made it to Marathon, Fl. It was somewhat of a milestone when we set our anchor just outside of Boot Key Harbor on the West side of Boot Key. We had always said when we left home in June that we hoped to make it as far as Marathon so when we actually arrived we felt like we had accomplished what we set out to do this year and if we never went any further, we would be happy!
We left our anchorage in Biscayne Bay after a nice week not only weather wise but also fun spending time around the South Beach area of Miami and visiting with Dave and Judy and Kent and Linda. By the time we left our anchorage the boat was in need of a good wash, the water tanks needed refilling and the head needed to be pumped out. We found out that you could go into Miamarina at Bayside and pay a flat fee of $25.00 for a 3 to 4 hour stay. We decided to do that and spent a good part of the morning working at cleaning the boat and getting it ready again for our next leg of the the trip. Bruce and I also fit in a trip to Starbucks to get on the Internet and check out mail, pay a few bills and make a few skype calls to family and friends. We then treated ourselves to lunch and some shopping before heading back to the boat for a short trip to No Name Harbor in Bill Baggs Park. For some reason right now, I can receive e-mails but neither Karen and I have been able to send any mail. We are working on the problem and hope we can get it fixed soon. In the meantime, we are receiving your e-mails but unfortunately cannot send back a reply!
While heading over to No Name Harbor, we started getting worried that we wouldn't be able to find any room in the Harbor to anchor for the night as we had stayed longer at Bayside than we had planned and it would be getting dark by the time we made it to our anchorage thus leaving us little time to get to another find another before dark. We looked at our charts and found another anchorage close by so decided to stop sooner and avoid the danger of not finding another anchorage before dark. I think it was a smart decision as the next morning when we arrived in No Name Harbor, we found it to be a lot smaller than we pictured it to be and already fairly crowded with boats. By late afternoon, we were all crammed in like sardines and any late comers were out of luck when it came to finding a spot to anchor. It ended up to be a beautiful spot and we decided to get our bikes out and do some exploring. The park takes up 494 acres at the southern tip of Key Biscayne, has a working 19th century lighthouse and one of the top 10 beaches in the U.S. It was a beautiful sunny, hot day and after a great lunch in the harbor we decided to check out the beach. It truly was one of the nicest ones we have been on so far. Because of the natural reef in front of the beach, the water is really calm and there were no pebbles, rocks or seaweed, just a beautiful hard sand bottom! We probably should have stayed a few more days, but we were anxious to make it to the Keys. We weren't sure how we were going to get out early in the morning as the harbor was so crowded that we were sure another boat had to be on top of our anchor. We did however manage to leave without hitting anyone on the way out (mostly due to my good driving abilities).
By that evening, we were anchored beside Key Largo just in front of Rodrigues Key and enjoyed a swim in the blue, clear, warm (27 degrees) water. We decided to stay there an extra day to take advantage of the nice weather and water so Bruce could get his tanks on and clean the bottom of ours and Jim and Karen's boat. As the water gets warmer, we get more and more growth on the bottom of our boat and Bruce could notice that it was slowing us down when motoring or sailing. Jim put on his snorkel and cleaned along the waterline and Karen and I helped from the dinghy. With all of us working, it didn't take long to get the job done and Bruce said it really came off easy just using a brush. We finished just in time for lunch and of course an afternoon nap for Bruce!
We had a great sail the next day on our way to Marathon. It was an easy 50 miles and the wind was from the Northwest. We probably sailed for about 5 hours, which is a record for the last few months!! We were unable to get a mooring ball inside Boot Key Harbor so we anchored on the West side of the island for the night. The next day we took the dinghy into the city marina and put our name on a waiting list for a mooring ball. Unfortunately before we were assigned a ball, the weather turned very windy and it was out of a direction which made it quite uncomfortable on anchor. Since there was no where else to go, we just toughed it out and ended up spending 2 fairly uncomfortable nights with high winds and thunder storms. We got in touch with Dave and Pat (Dragon Wick) and they told us about a friend of theirs that had a couple of docks to rent. She got in touch with them for us and to make a long story short (as Lilliane would say) we are now in front of their house on their dock which is only about 2 doors down from Dockside (the dock we had originally booked for January and February) and have all the amenities we would have in a Marina. The place is fantastic. We have taken our bikes out again and plan to call this home for a couple of months. We were sure glad to get this place but unfortunately not before we lost our anchor again for the second time since we bought the boat, Bruce fell overboard while climbing onto the boat from the dinghy (just a few bruises) and we broke our davits while trying to raise the dingy. It was definitely not one of our better days!
We realized once we were finally settled that Bruce had let his health insurance lapse and the only way to get insurance again was to return to Canada. I was planning on coming home for a few days anyway, as Bruce and a few of the guys were planning a trip to Miami for golf, so we moved our trip up a few days and we both flew home together. I immediately went up to Sault Ste. Marie to see my mom ( who is turning 80 years young on the 28th of February) and we had a good visit and I was able to spend a nice couple of days with her and my sister and take my mom out for her birthday. Happy Birthday Mom!!!
I came back to Mississauga in time to do spend some time with Lindsay and take her shopping for her 20th birthday on March 8! Can't believe my baby is getting so old! I was not able to see too many people as my car broke down and was in the shop for the entire week. They still have it and no word yet on when we will get it back. There is no rush now that we are back on the boat. I met up with Bruce in Ft. Lauderdale on Monday night and we drove back to Marathon together. As I was saying, we will be here now until we put the boat away some time in the second or third week of April. We had planned on leaving for the Bahamas but decided that it would just be too rushed and we didn't think we wanted to do that. We will probably plan 2 to 3 months in the Bahamas next year when we have more time to enjoy it. That decision made, we were able to have some company here. Bruce's sister and her husband are coming for a week in March as well as my sister and her husband are planning on coming for Easter weekend. Leanne hopes to come for a couple of days of diving with her dad and we hope to meet up with friends that are planning on coming to the Keys in March and April. It should be busy and the time will pass quickly. It is hard to believe that we have been on the boat for 9 months already and that we are quickly coming to the end of this adventure. We have pretty much decided to leave the boat here in Marathon for the summer at the Marathon Boat Yard. We now have to figure out how to summerize the boat as opposed to winterizing the boat! Any suggestions or helpful tips are always appreciated! Any visitors are also welcome, just make sure to reserve early as we are already getting booked up!



South Beach, here we come!

Heading into Miami.

Sailing in the Keys!

Need your boat moved to Europe, this is the boat that it will be loaded onto and moved for you!

Private boat docked at someones house, makes ours look really small!

Salty Lady, our friend's boat registered in Sault Ste. Marie. They are in the Bahamas now but hope to meet up with them again in the Keys in April.

Visit with Steve, Shirley, Mark and Carol just before leaving Nettles Island

We are on the move again! We finally left our comfortable slip at Nettles Island Marina and all the new friends that we had met during our six week stay and headed back to the high seas. It was a bit tough to get back into the travelling mode after such a long time in one place but we were glad to be back on the water. We left the marina with Jim and Karen as well as another Canadian couple, Bob and Mardi on Salty Lady, that we had spent some time with during our time on Nettles Island. Their boat was registered in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario but they were from Sudbury and were headed to the Bahamas. Since most of you know that Sault Ste. Marie is my hometown, it was nice to get to know another couple from Northern Ontario! They truly are a great bunch of people. It is a small world as they are now living on Manitoulin Island and Bob knows my cousin Garnet Behnke as he plays hockey with him during the summer. There had been quite a bit of wind prior to us leaving and the waves in the Atlantic were still 5 to 6 feet high so we decided to stay in the ICW and although it would take us longer as we had 7 or 8 bridges to go through, it would be a lot more comfortable for us. We went as far as West Palm Beach and all anchored in the same area after some confusion as to where that was and a grounding by Captain Bruce (managed to motor off the bottom without any assistance). Bob and Mardi invited as all over for a movie and popcorn night after dinner and after finally deciding on a movie that no one had seen before, we all enjoyed the movie! After going to bed before Bruce I was awakened by the sound of the engine starting and I got up out of bed to see what was going on. Bruce said that he though we were getting too close to Jim and Karen's boat and that we would have to raise our anchor, move further away and set it again. At this point, we could not find our anchor ball anywhere and realized that it was under the boat but did not realize this before Bruce had put the boat in gear and what we didn't know was we had wrapped the line from the ball around our prop as we decided that maybe we didn't need to move after all. The next morning we were sitting in the cockpit having our coffee when Jim and Karen's boat seem like it was moving past us, when in fact we were the ones moving past them. Our anchor had been pulled off the bottom by the trip line that was wrapped around our prop when the wind changed and we were moving quite fast. Thank goodness there were only a few boats in the anchorage and we didn't get to close to any other boats, although there were a few tense moments while we tried to figure out what had happened! We managed to reset the anchor but knew that there was still line wrapped around the prop and Bruce would have to dive down and cut it off. This time there was no Lillianne to do it for him! Jim came over and helped him get all his gear on and we were thankful for the new sharp knife we had bought the last time this happened to cut the line! The water temperature was also 26 degrees so he didn't even need a wet suit. Things could have been a lot worse it this had happened in the middle of the night when we were sleeping. Who knows where we would have ended up. We had only been on the water again for two days and two bad things had happened already. This is when we realized that we had not thrown any money into the sea when we left again and although we are not usually superstitious, we did not leave again without throwing a few coins overboard!
Bob and Mardi were leaving the next day but we stayed an extra day as we need to go into customs and get a new cruising permit. When we had talked to customs on the phone, we were told that the permit that we were given in Bar Harbor was an old one that is no longer being used and it would be better for us to have the new one so we wanted to get that taken care of before we left for the Bahamas so it wouldn't be a problem for us when we tried to get back into the United States. We found the customs officer in West Palm to be one of the nicest officers we had ever met and wanted to get it from here rather than take our chances with someone else!
We left West Palm onTuesday, January 29th and thankfully this time were able to go out the Lake Worth inlet into the Atlantic and head to Ft. Lauderdale. The only bad thing was that there was that the wind was from the South which was the direction we were travelling so we motor sailed again but at least there were no bridge schedules to worry about! Ft. Lauderdale was about a 50 mile run from West Palm and we pulled into the Port Everglades Inlet around 2 p.m. We anchored in Lake Sylvie and dropped the dingy to go exploring. Within about 30 minutes of anchoring a police boat came up to the boat to inform us that there was a 24 hour anchoring rule in Ft. Lauderdale. We had hoped to spend a few days in the area to visit Dave and Judy and see a few others that spend the winter in Ft. Lauderdale from P.C.Y.C but we were unable to pick up a mooring ball and since we could only anchor for one day, we decided to head to Miami the next morning. We did manage to do a bit of exploring by dinghy and see Dave and Judy for about 1/2 hour before we left.
We are now anchored on the Biscayne Bay side of South Beach and have been enjoying an amazing stretch of hot, sunny weather! It has been great spending time in South Beach people watching, sitting in cafe's for happy hours and enjoying the beautiful beach. We can take the dinghy up the canal, park it in front of the Publix and then walk to the beach from there. Dave and Judy drove down for lunch and spent the day with us as well as another couple from Ottawa who were in Ft. Lauderdale to inspect a 41 foot PDQ that they have an offer pending on. Some of you may remember the dock we used in Gan on our way through the Thousand Islands that belonged to some friends of my friend Joanne from Ottawa. Their names are Kent and Linda and they are the ones that are here looking at the boat. They heard through Joanne that we were in the area, so they looked us up and we finally got to meet each other. We had heard so much about them through the years but had never met. Everyone ended up coming back to the boat for dinner and a swim. It is so great to get together with friends along the way and we look forward to these times! Dave and Judy have been to visit us at least 4 times and Bruce says that they have almost caught up to the number of times we have seen his sister and brother-in-law on this trip!
We hope to leave here perhaps on Tuesday if the weather holds. I have been having problems with my hearing aids and may have to send them to Toronto but have to wait until at least Monday to talk to the girl in the office. I was supposed to talk to her on Friday but with the snow storm in Toronto, no one was in. There are worse places to be stuck and today is Super Bowl Sunday so it should be a zoo in South Beach. Not sure if Kent and Linda will come back again today to spend the day at the beach with us. Again it is going to be another hot, sunny day! I am not going to be able to post any pictures this time as the internet is very slow and very intermittent so will have to wait for better internet, but thought everyone could use an update on our whereabouts. Talk to you from the Keys!