Post No. Three, Day 135 LVG-
I have to say I love the idea of documenting our adventures and sharing a good story, but it has only taken me a decade or so to realize that I am not very good at doing it in any semblance of a punctual time frame. I just don’t think my constitution is congruent with our modern age of instant updates and streaming feeds of short-term memory chum. I pine for the days when some erstwhile explorer could go off adventuring and upon his return take a solid four or five years to pen their manuscript, publish it, and still be relevant! Alas, but here we are, on the eve of 2020**, and what we did two days ago, let alone two months ago seems glaringly non-relevant to anyone but us! My resolutions this year obviously include trying to stay current with our blog, as it is every year, but we all know the eventual outcome of such short-sighted ambitions. I guess a more impactful resolution would be to work on becoming a better writer, more deliberate and more thoughtful, so that whenever our stories are read, they are interesting and entertaining, regardless of how relevant they are. In the words of Hemmingway “Do something worth writing about…” (check!) “… and write something worth reading.” (working on it!).
(**Post script: my resolution to keep up to date on this blog didn’t even make it a hot minute into 2020 and was, like most resolutions, DOA. Now, a mere MONTH into 2020, I am finally posting what I had started to write, above and most of what is below. Boy, I really could use a dictaphone, a secretary, and some financial incentive to keep my pen to the paper….)
Picking up where we left off… St. Augustine seems like a lifetime ago. After moving from the mooring balls across the river to anchor for a few days, we were anxious to catch the next weather window and head further south. It turns out we were a little too anxious. First off, the prudent sailor times transiting the St. Augustine inlet with slack tide because it can be quite a task to navigate the shifting sandy shoals at the entrance with any amount of current. Well, all I can say is that we tried to do that, but somehow found ourselves still with a sizable outgoing tide, which unfortunately was met head-on by pretty gusty contrary wind- this all played out to mean we were making less than 3 kts true through the inlet, against a 15 to 20 kt headwind, bashing into very irascible waves that grew to 10 or 15 feet at the mouth to the inlet. After 20 minutes or so of this hell, I was about to turn around and throw in the towel, but we just made it out of the shallows and were able to turn south into deeper water, where the wave action was slightly calmer at a still distressing 5 feet on average. In hindsight, we definitely should have gone back, for as we turned south, so the wind did as well, and our ordeal had really just begun.
The second thing a prudent sailor on the Florida coast does is avoid sailing south against the Gulf Stream, or the Florida Current as it is technically called in these parts. Well, everything I had read indicated that the stream was four or five miles off shore in this area, so our three miles off shore should have been well within the folds of reasonability. This was not in fact the case, the current having dipped inside closer to shore for some insidious reason, and we could only muster an average of about 4 kts. We did test the water closer in, two miles, one mile, but it didn’t seem to help our boat speed at all, so we went back to the most direct route south possible, which left us continually bashing into wind and waves for almost 24 hours, at which point we rounded Cape Canaveral, and snuck into the harbor to recuperate and lick our wounds. The captain’s lapse in judgement the previous day regarding the coastal proximity of the gulf stream became apparent when we stayed a mere half mile off shore the following day and not only avoided the brunt of the current, but actually caught some favorable counter currents that helped us move along at a very respectable 8 kts!
At any rate, we made it south to Miami without much additional headache, and took a mooring ball at the very edge of the very popular Coconut Grove Municipal Marina. Little did we know when we arrived that we would be tied up there for almost a month- at first enjoying the amazing city (none of us had ever been to Miami before, but all of us could envision happily living there now), and then having to rectify some boat issues: three new size 8D batteries (each 180 lbs and about as awkward to move aboard as a few dead bodies a la Weekend at Bernie’s), and our one year old battery charger/inverter’s premature death that luckily blew up while we were still in the US with the opportunity and means to fix it under warranty. But the biggest anchor that kept us in port was that we were waiting on the renewal of our Coast Guard Certificate of Documentation for the Saint Robert. The COD is basically our vehicle registration for the boat, and we’d need it to pass through immigration and customs in all the far-flung countries we hope to visit. The problem was that the COD has to be renewed every year, and ours is due every October. However, last October, renewing the COD had slipped my mind because I was a little preoccupied with Teddy’s unfortunate run in with botulism and everything that went along with that. I realized my negligence when we started our move back to the boat in August and quickly applied for the renewal. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. I have to say, it kind of fell off my radar again, considering we wouldn’t need the COD until we left the US, which would be a few months from the time I reapplied, but finding ourselves in Miami in the middle of November hoping to cross to the Bahamas in the next week or two, it very much jumped to the top of my radar once again. Upon inquiry as to the status of our renewal, we soon learned that the Coast Guard office in charge of issuing the CODs was experiencing some delays due to “technical issues with their computer system”, which I interpret as budget cuts, leading to a four plus month delay in paperwork processing. We, in fact, having filed our paperwork in August, had another six weeks to wait according to our status on their website. 6 weeks!!? Well, that wasn’t going to work. Fortunately, the Coast Guard, the most wholesome branch of the armed services, was forgiving and helpful, and after a short phone call explaining our situation, the officer on the other end told me to pen a letter, she informing me exactly what to write and how to phrase it so as to be accepted, requesting priority handling of our renewal paperwork. In quick order this was written, printed, signed, scanned and emailed with the unassuming help of the Coconut Grove Public Library, on a sunny Thursday afternoon. Apparently, it did the trick, as our new COD was in the mail the very next day. Unfortunately, the postal service, god bless ‘em, was not as johnny on the spot as their Coast Guard counterparts, and it took a full seven days later to receive the letter- granted it was the week of Thanksgiving. In any case, we got the COD on Saturday, November 30, and set sail for the Bahamas on December 1st, 2019.
Stepping back a bit, our time in Miami was unexpectedly drawn out, but we enjoyed every day of it. First off, Coconut Grove is a fabulous neighborhood. Not at all the Miami of my imagination, CG is safely south of the Miami Beach corinthians, the meat heads, and the nightclubs. It has shady tree lined avenues, small boutiques and hole-in-the wall eateries, ice cream shops, parks and playgrounds every other block, free public buses, free on-call shuttle service, and I swear that almost every day we were there a festival or event of some sort was going on at the big park by the marina. But the real clencher, the thing that could, or perhaps could have already, convinced us to move there, is that we were treated with nothing less than wholesome hospitality from everyone we met, from the barista, to the librarian, to the Cuban sandwich guy, to the entire fire department at the memorial day festival, to the amazing Argentine family we met one fortunate morning at the local playground- who after running into them again at the Memorial Day festival, invited us over for a playdate of our boys with their kids. Things developed from there, and before we knew it, we were enjoying an amazing Argentinian parrilla, poolside in an amazing custom built town house, making fast friends that, should we ever venture back to Miami, or they to Colorado, we are sure to reconnect with again.
Lots and lots of pictures to follow, someday…
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