Category: 2015 Charleston to Marathon

It will be a 90 mile haul, so we got an early start with a first stop at a nearby diesel fuel spot (note to boaters: never, ever get fuel from the Shell dealer in Dinner Key – more later). Cliff and Ann were a bit nervous about the trip into the Keys’ shallow waters — but that was the reason we bought a Bluewater in the first place; it draws just 3 feet. A beautiful day across Biscayne Bay and into Florida Bay at Card Sound. Mostly open waters of 7+ feet, with occasional cuts across shallows and mangrove islands that were well marked. Gary and Cliff spotted three dolphin in one of the cuts, the first seen since before Ft. Lauderdale. Lots of egrets along the mangroves and unbelievably crystal clear, turquoise colored water. A slight glitch as we were about an hour away from Marathon — the engine alarm went off. The reason: water in the fuel. Fortunately, we’d had the problem in Knoxville and Cliff knew just what to do. We anchored and he hoisted the bed to get access to the fuel filters, drained off a LOT of water and we were good to go. The real nervousness of the trip involved docking for the first time in our canal. There is a rocky ledge about half-way across the canal and Cliff needed to spin Dot.Calm around in what looked (to me!) like a mighty narrow piece of water. Mission accomplished. We are safely and securely docked at home. A jungle of orchids awaited us in Ann’s “orchid hospital” and the pool was a perfect temperature for a cooling swim. Glad to be here and thrilled to have completed our ICW dream.  I think the cruising life is a bit addictive — I’m already looking forward to our next adventure.

Fairchild Gardens are worth a trip if you even get half way close to Coral Gables. A serendipitous treat for us on this visit was a full-scale Chihuly exhibit throughout the gardens. Pictures don’t do these multifaceted glass sculptures and installations justice, but I am sharing some with you any way. The butterfly house here is magical. Apparently, today’s temperature and amount of sunlight were just right to send the thousands of butterflies into fluttering ecstasy. Tried to capture the thrill of seeing dozens of butterflies flying around us all at once, but really couldn’t. As we walked through the tropical paths, butterflies were everywhere — most flying and gliding, some resting with their wings open on broad leaf landing pads and others resting dangerously on the pathways (watch your step!) Cliff and I started the day with a hike to the post office to get our tax payments postmarked before tomorrow. I believe we have enough money left to pay for fuel for the trip to Marathon tomorrow!

Did you know that SpaceX launched the Falcon9 spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center today? This is one of the tidbits we heard about when we visited the Center with Jassa while in Titusville what seems like ages ago.  Didn’t want any of you to miss this historic event. The big event at Dot.Calm today was the arrival of Gary and Carolyn Kreutz for the last leg of our cruising journey to Marathon. We decided to stay in Coral Gables for an extra day — with hopes of getting a marine electrician to work on our electronic charts system. No luck with those arrangements, but an extra day to recover from our system-free voyage still seems like a good idea. We had a very relaxing day with Gary and Carolyn. An antipasto snack (sounds repetitive, I know…but there is limited storage space on a boat….you have to go with what you have!) on Dot.Calm’s breezy top deck and a wonderful swim in the big pool at the Coral Reef Yacht Club where we are staying. We had a rather international day, starting with breakfast at a tiny French bistro before saying adieu to Cleo and Jim and ending with dinner at an Italian spot with Gary and Carolyn.  It’s been fun listening to people who walk by the boat react to our boat name and the boat itself. One passer by told us the difference between a yacht and a boat:  You have a yacht if someone else cleans it…..you have a boat if you clean it yourself. We are on a boat!

 

Started the day in an appropriately luxurious manner: a champagne breakfast on the top deck. Egg salad with smoked salmon and fruit salad and, of course, champagne. The mood quickly changed as we got ready to depart. The electronic charts were completely out. As we tinkered with the screens, we managed to set off an alarm. As we tried to figure out how we did that, we managed to set off an even louder alarm. You are all familiar with the deterrent effect of car alarms — make them loud and obnoxious enough and the thief will run away. Well, we were dealing with the same reaction but needed to stick around and figure it out. Cliff finally did — so the alarm stopped, but the charts still didn’t work.  And so, off we went with our paper charts and the out-of-date cruising guide and managed to get to our intended destination (Coral Reef Yacht Club in Coral Gables) without a glitch. We had lots of bridges to contend with and were worried a bit about water depths, but the trip went smoothly. “Smoothly” is perhaps the wrong word. It was Sunday on the water in southern Florida which means that every boater that could was on the water. There were two spots where a hundred or so boats (maybe more) and hundreds and hundreds of people congregated along shoals or small islands — just hanging out and enjoying the day. I was glad we would NOT be there when it was time for them to head home. Coral Reef Yacht Club is a fairly large, active boating community. People are very friendly and the facilities quite nice. An antipasto tray staved off our hunger pangs and we enjoyed several games of Mexican Train up top. Beautiful breeze and fun to watch the sail boats come back in from racing offshore. We are having dinner at the club tonight. We all need a relaxing evening!
P.S. Forgot an opportunity to “name drop” yesterday. When we were on our dinghy cruise, a small fishing boat passed us with a jovial friendly man with a big smile and a hello to match. It was Rex Ryan — ex-coach of the NYJets and new coach of the Buffalo Bills.

Finding us at Pier 66 isn’t as easy as we thought.  Cleo and Jim took a taxi from Coral Gables and the driver dropped them at Dock F.  We are on Dock B and it’s a long distance between the two, but we eventually found them and made our way back to Dot.Calm.  Cleo and Jim brought lunch and Cliff and I “arranged” for perfect, cool breezes on the top deck where we could enjoy it while looking out over the fleet of yachts that surround us. Later we went for a dinghy ride to get a close up look at some of the fabulous boats and also to tour some canals where the neighborhoods seem to be for regular folks and not the rich and famous who must be the ones who are buying and/or building the mansions along the ICW. One of the biggest yachts in the marina is Seven Seas. It is owned by Steven Spielberg and is 282 feet long and cost $200,000,000 to build. (He bought it used for something less than that….but probably not a lot less.)  The yacht can sleep 12 and has a staff of 26! You can have a taste of this splendor for only $1.3 million a week. That does not include fuel, food, liquor or staff tips. The “rule of thumb” we’ve heard is that you double the rental fee to figure out what the trip will really cost you. Yikes! We will leave this enclave of luxury yachts and head to Coral Gables tomorrow and will have a chance to ooh and ash over more homes and more boats along the way.

Busy bees today. Boat cleaning and laundry, getting squared away with the dock master and figuring out how to get fuel, what amenities we can use and other little marina details. Decided to rent a car in order to easily do some provisioning — groceries for the weekend and a resupply of wine and bubbly.  We also had some boat gizmos we’ve been trying to find (flexible squeegee, fender hanging “controllers” to make it easy to change positions) and looked up the nearest West Marine.  The basic rule of marine shopping is that anything you could purchase at a regular hardware store is about four times as expensive once the word “boat” is added to the description.  This West Marine Store was the largest one we’ve ever seen.  And they had everything we wanted and more including a couple of pairs of shorts for each of us.  It’s hot here! Hooray. And our traveling wardrobes were heavily weighted toward the wintery temperatures we had on the first 3/4 of the trip. A treat was lunch at Blue Moon Fish Company in Ft. Lauderdale by the Sea. This is a place we’ve visited many times before — once in our Glacier Bay fishing boat when it was in Ft. Lauderdale getting new engines. They did some remodeling since we were last there — very nice. And lunch was terrific. Cleo and Jim Comerford arrive tomorrow. Can’t wait!

We’ve moved from the land of WOW to the land of OMG. You’ll see what I mean in the pictures. OMG would also describe our day on the water. Too many bridges — most of which we had to wait for because we were too tall to go under them. Even these bridge tenders agreed! What “could” have been a 4 or 5 hour trip turned into nearly 8. We also had a few glitches along the way. A couple of times the radar went out (we didn’t need it — so no big deal, but scary to have anything go out on a boat). Another time the chart on one side went out (we had another, but, again, any electronic problems are worrisome). One time one of the engines stalled (we figured out the reason much later) and tested our ability to calmly figure out what the problem was and then solve it. Lessons learned. And totally annoying was the fact that our cruising guide turned out to have some out-dated information which caused us some delays as we dilly-dallied in a couple of places thinking that we would have to wait for the timed bridge opening when, in fact, we could easily get under the “new” bridge. Our reward was a berth at Pier 66 surrounded by mega yachts and a posh dinner at the Hyatt Regency.

Maybe the most perfect morning we’ve had so far. Warm sun, soft breeze, no hurry, lovely surroundings. Coffee and Danish on the top deck. Very nice. The day had some surprises and some repeating themes: almost as soon as we got back on the ICW, we found ourselves in a mangrove area that could have been anywhere in the Keys. We spotted osprey nests in trees rather than marker buoys and saw huge fish leaping out of the water (or at least the splash that remained). That tranquil scene changed quickly, though, as we began to see marinas and boat storage yards along the shore, lots more people on the water, shorelines filled with beautiful houses and some not-so-beautiful condos squeezed in here and there. Our biggest surprise of the day was a misprint in the cruising guide we are using. It showed our next mooring spot (Stuart, FL) at statute mile 1007 and showed that we had to pass under 10 bridges along the way. We missed the marina by nearly 20 miles, but fortunately found another just a short distance and one bridge away (Palm Beach Gardens). We’ll know now to check details like “what day mark” or “what mile marker” as we make arrangements. Ironically, just after deciding to take fore and aft photos of our mooring spots, we landed at a marina that has a major condo construction project going on….and it’s our forward view. But the people are very nice, the ladder to their dock is easily climbed, facilities are clean and the view aft is perfect.

Melbourne seems to be a dividing line between what I think of as the real world and “southern Florida.” We are far from being in the official south Florida — in fact, our latitude is about the same as Tampa, but the number of people in the water, on the water and around the water jumped exponentially as we headed south from Melbourne. We saw many northbound boats headed for home, but many more recreational fishing boats, jet skis, pontoon boats, walk around and walk-throughs, fishing kayaks, skiffs, paddle boards, etc.  This morning we even saw 8-man scull teams putting their boats away (shout out to The Boys in the Boat readers — the boys were a treat to behold!) We missed the actual racing with a lazy wake-up without an alarm. We didn’t have much distance to cover today and took it slow most of the way. There are some beautiful homes on the shores near Melbourne. There are wall-to-wall beautiful homes on the ICW shores in the Vero Beach area. Wow and wow-plus. We were surprised that many of them did not have docks and that none of them had mega-yachts moored behind them. Cliff supposed that they’d spent all their money on the homes. An argument that might hold water, except that I’ve cruised through Ft. Lauderdale where that is not the case at all. We are in a tiny marina inside a lovely gated community. The residents are happily tucked away from any city hubbub and they all must have cars. There is nothing really close to the marina, so we will be cabbing it for dinner and to a market. Our re-provisioning foray in Titusville was completely inadequate. We ate it all yesterday. We were down to a choice of a half-peanut butter sandwich (we are nearly out of peanut butter), some sort-of-stale pita chips and a nearly full container of cottage cheese (thank you Roger). Thankfully we had a green pepper, some left-over red onion and some celery sticks, so Ann made a good Jewish dairy dish. It should tide us over to dinner.

 

Wide water, populated territory, a half dozen 65-foot fixed bridges and a parade of boats (mostly sailboats and trawlers) heading north comprised our day on the water. We were on the Indian River for most of the day traveling about 35 miles to Melbourne Harbor. It took us more than 5 hours because we cruised at a very leisurely pace and cranked it down even further to reduce our wake as we passed other boats. We experienced polite boaters and not-so-polite — the usual Florida mix. Honestly, I wonder where some of these people learned to boat. One guy continually shouted over radio Channel 16 to every boat he overtook announcing his intention to overtake with never a mention about slowing down or what side he would pass on. Our path eventually intersected his and I was tempted to give him a shout-out of my own….but decided he wouldn’t get it anyway. Fewer sightings of dolphin, but when we did see them there were usually six or more in the group. We are tucked into a very short dock at Melbourne Harbor — the last slip available. Getting on and off the boat is a “bit” of a challenge since the exit doorway is about 3 feet shy of the walkway. With any luck, we’ll figure it out without taking an unexpected swim. We were supposed to stay at the Eau Gallie Yacht Club, but could never get a confirmation from them despite multiple calls and conversations.