In the Bahamas, Baby!

We made it. A plan that was hatched over six years ago has finally come to fruition. And I gotta tell ya, it feels great!

Our last week in the US was spent in a slip in Fort Lauderdale. We met up with my sister-in-law Star (from my first marriage) and her family who live in Miami Lakes, just north of Miami. Star has been an important presence in our lives for years, particularly for my son Dewey who lost his father at the tender age of twelve. Dewey’s Christmas vacations since then have all been spent in Florida, and Star has always put in a giant effort to keep in touch with us. I couldn’t be more grateful. So when Star and David invited us to attend their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration, we had to include Miami in our itinerary!

 

Dewey walking the bride down the aisle!

Star planned a major shindig at their waterfront home, with a white dress and a renewal of vows with David, followed by dinner and dancing. We had a blast. The only regret on my part was that, as one tends to do when having fun, I forgot to take any pictures. I had to borrow from Star’s Facebook page to include any photos.

The morning after the wedding, I took both Rick and Dewey to the airport; Dewey for a flight back to Baltimore, and Rick for a flight to New York. Rick was involved in the making of “Wormwood” on Netflix, an Errol Morris six-part documentary/dramatization of the 1950’s death of Frank Olson, father of Rick’s longtime friend Eric Olson. Rick makes a few short appearances in a couple of episodes, speaking primarily about Eric’s “collage method” of psychotherapy that first brought Eric and Rick together in Boston forty years ago. There was a private viewing of the whole four hour work in New York, followed by a reception, and we both thought it was important for Rick to be there. So he met Peter Sarsgaard who stars in the film… (I asked him if he met Maggie Gyllenhaal who was reported to be there as well. Rick is being rather evasive on that one.)

I was left on the boat, running a zillion and one errands (oh boy, Boothby, do you owe me one).

It’s kind of amazing how difficult it is to leave the country for an extended period. Extra months worth of prescriptions need to be approved by the insurance company, the cell phone plan needs to be changed so our phones will work in the Bahamas, we need a ship station license to use our VHF radio in foreign waters, we need customs papers for the boat, and on and on. Then we have to provision the boat with food (and, who are we kidding, lots and lots of booze), and of course find room for it all aboard. The upside for me is that after three days of numerous trips around town, I now know Ft. Lauderdale like the back of my hand!

Once Rick is back on station we are able to work twice as fast, but we still miss our Friday morning weather window for crossing the Gulf Stream. It’s a ten-hour passage, and the trick is to avoid arriving in a foreign port after dark, meaning you need to shove off first thing in the morning. It looks probable that there won’t be another good window (favorable winds) for some time, possibly weeks. So we make the unconventional choice to take an afternoon nap and make the crossing overnight, arriving sometime just after dawn. The guide books don’t recommend it, particularly on a first time crossing. But hey, what do they know?

We have been on the flat waters of the ICW for a very long trek, and going out in the open ocean for the first time in six weeks means probable sea-sickness for this first mate. So I slap on a patch and fall pretty immediately into scopolamine oblivion. By the time I come to in the wee hours of the morning, Rick has gotten us across the Gulf Stream all by himself in the dark. There are basically two big dangers with this crossing; the unbelievably strong current that can set you way off course, and the overwhelming boat traffic. Ships and other boat are lit of course, but distances can be much more difficult to judge at night. Rick is pretty experienced at sailing through shipping channels in the dark, but even so, this trip was especially nervy. He tells me that at one point our little boat was in the middle of four city-sized cruise ships, apparently oblivious to our miniscule presence. Thankfully, he could see them plain as day; they were lit up like Christmas trees.

We pulled in to North Bimini as the sun was rising. I was wide awake and ready for an adventure, but Rick was clearly not himself, having been on station all night. We had a little scare coming in to a slip, misjudging the strength of the current and getting stuck broadside on the outer pilings. We scraped into the end of the dock with a sickening squeal. Yeah. Won’t do it that way again. Luckily no damage was done, and the dock hand helped us get into the slip with extra line and muscle. I couldn’t understand a word he said to us in his thick island accent. But we sure were grateful. Thank you Brown’s Marina!

Rick slept while I walked in to Alice Town, a sleepy one road hamlet with colorful houses and a handful of funky little shops, bars and restaurants.  I met a number of locals walking also, but most people were riding golf carts, the most prevalent mode of transportation here. Ernest Hemingway was a regular visitor to Alice Town back in the thirties, but his notorious hangout is now just a pile of rubble indicated by a faded sign. Most of the town seems pretty rundown, and I can’t tell if the boarded up windows and dilapidated buildings are from recent hurricane activity, or rather from a longer history of poverty and neglect. Most likely both.

 I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t quite daring enough to try the fare at the local conch shacks, but I loved the enormous piles of shells discarded nearby. I’ve always thought that conch shells were prized objects that carried high price tags in Floridian souvenir shops. Here they are so numerous and commonplace that they end up in giant trash heaps.

Wait - how did that get here?

After one night in the slip, we moved on to anchor on our own at Gun Cay. We originally anchored on the East side of the island, but after a night of rolling back and forth, I insisted we move to the aptly named Honeymoon Harbor which is beautiful and better protected from wind and current. The water is an impossible shade of blue here. You know, that aqua color that is used to line swimming pools, a color that until now I never believed existed in nature. I could just sit and look at that water all day long.

We try out our new snorkeling equipment for the first time, and find ourselves only an arm’s length away from an eight foot shark! He is missing a large chunk out of one side of his mouth, giving him a distinctively gruesome look. Rick tells me that he is a “nurse shark,” perfectly harmless, but I still scream into my snorkel as he swims by. Apparently this particular fish is well known around here. The French guy in the next boat over calls him “Marcel”.

Rays come right up to you, looking for handouts.

By the way, “Cay” is pronounced “Key” by the locals, and “Kay” by the tourists. So do we try to fit in as people who belong here, knowing full well that we won’t be fooling anyone, or do we immediately identify ourselves as interlopers? “Key” or “Kay”?

Who cares – it’s the Bahamas, mon! Say whatever comes to mind and go have a pina colada!

A Gleam of Sunshine

I’ve been to the state of Florida many times in the past, having had parents and in-laws living in the Sunshine State. I’ve always enjoyed the warm winter weather, the palm trees, and my loved ones, but I’ve not been a fan of the flat terrain, the slow drivers, and worst of all, the ugly commercial strips that seem to line the highways and roads for miles. I had a preconceived notion that the Florida section of the ICW would be much the same; overpopulated and ugly. I am happy to report that I was mistaken.

Getting here from Charleston included an extended stop in Beaufort, SC (pronounced “Byoo-fort”, not to be confused with its sister city in North Carolina, pronounced “Bow-fort”) to collect my cellphone at the post office there. In my last post, I told the story of my lost phone, having left it by accident in the Uber car that took me to the airport in Baltimore. We expected the phone to have arrived in Beaufort before we did, having been sent “overnight” by my Uber driver. Guess what? Not there. We dinghied in the next day, and then the next, thinking that we would grab the phone and get underway, only to have our hopes dashed again and again by the friendly postal workers who informed us of the no-show package in their exaggerated southern drawls. I felt quite lost without my phone, which acts as my tether to life onshore, and my frustration at being cut off from the world was made worse by the question of not only “when”, but “if” I would get the thing back. The package ended up taking most of a week to get to its destination, apparently having mistakenly gone to Fort Lauderdale first. Thank you USPS. Fortunately, it did finally arrive, the phone was in perfect shape, and we were at long last able to shove off.

We spent a cold, rainy Thanksgiving on anchor in a spot just south of Savannah. We had planned to attend the big annual Cruiser’s Thanksgiving at the Riverview Hotel in St. Mary’s, Georgia, where ICW travelers meet up and enjoy a turkey feast, with side dishes pot-lucked in by the boaters. Sadly, our delay in Beaufort made that an impossibility. We tried to make the best of it though; I made an apple pie, mashed potatoes, squash and cranberry sauce, and we heated up a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. I even made a festive (ugly) centerpiece with found pinecones and shells. We were very thankful - for each other, for our year away. But if I’m being totally honest, most of the thankfulness that day was for being dry inside the boat!

St. Augustine was our first real stop in Florida, and we took a couple of days off out of our cruising schedule to really enjoy it. First on the list of things to do was a visit to the Castillo de San Marcos, a fortress built by the Spanish conquistadors in 1672. We saw the structure from the water on our way in to anchor and quickly Googled to find out what it was. The castle is a star shaped masonry fort made of coquina, a limestone-like stone formed when ancient shells have bonded together over time. 

What is it about boys and guns?

It looks like a medieval European castle. There’s even a dry moat. Yes, DRY! Apparently the ”moat” was intended to have flood-water in it only during an attack. The rest of the time, it was used as grazing land for livestock. In the 1940s, someone came up with the bright idea to flood the moat permanently. No doubt some wealthy, influential American came up with this, some European wannabe with a need to recreate fairy tales. I mean, it’s a castle, right? Castles are supposed to have moats! Over time, the water started to deteriorate the structure, and finally wiser heads prevailed. The moat was drained, returning to the castle to its original design.

Next, we visited Flagler College, which occupies the buildings and grounds of the old Ponce de Leon Hotel. Built in 1888, the building still has the original Tiffany stained glass windows, fountains, mosaics and sculptures. This thing is HUGE. Apparently the college now uses the old hotel as offices and the student dormitory. I had never heard of Flagler College before, but the tuition is more than reasonable; I would consider attending this school just for the living quarters alone. Hopefully the students actually learn something while they’re here.

Flagler College

 St. Augustine was founded in 1565, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States, and the narrow St. George Street was the original main street for the town. Now for the modern era, St. George has been transformed into a pedestrian thoroughfare. Between the tourists, fudge shops and all of the “Ye Olde …” phrases on signs, the place has a Disneyfied feel to it. I have to keep reminding myself that we are in a historic town, not attending a renaissance fair. The whole historic portion of St. Augustine is also completely decked out in Christmas lights, giant inflatable snowmen and reindeer. It’s a little strange for us northerners to see overdone holiday décor in a warm setting that includes palm trees. Not that I’m wishing for snow or anything, but it’s just weird.

We had dinner at an historic old Cuban/Spanish place called the Columbia Restaurant. The waitress made a pitcher of Sangria de Cava (sparkling sangria) right at our table, and then we enjoyed a triple-decker presentation of tapas, followed by paella. The Columbia sure put our paltry Thanksgiving meal to shame!

After St. Augustine, we continue our voyage down the ICW. The shorelines are sometimes dotted with enormous mansions – I guess they don’t call it the “Florida Gold Coast” for nothing – but for the most part the scenery is wild. We see the ubiquitous pelicans, cormorants, herons, greater and lesser egrets, and ospreys. We even get a couple of manatee sightings. But no alligators – darn it! Apparently they prefer fresh water, and the ICW is made up of tidal rivers and salty or brackish water. We see lots of dolphins though. We’re used to seeing them from a distance in the north too, but they behave a little differently down here. It has become a regular occurrence for dolphins to come up beside our boat and swim right along side for five minutes or so. They seem to like the spot right next to the cockpit, coming up for air about every thirty seconds, almost as though they are checking us out, the same way we are looking at them. Often, they even appear in pairs. I know this sounds like a tall tail, like we regularly see mermaids or something, but for once I can prove it! Here’s a video:

(Sorry about the last 30 seconds of just looking at water. I could NOT figure out how to cut the thing.)

You would almost never know that this was a bad year for hurricanes. Palm trees are tall and strong, the landscape looks natural, and houses look untouched by wind or flood damage. But here and there, all the way down the ICW we can see evidence of what must have been ferocious storms. Docks and pilings askew, boats mysteriously aground way off of the shoreline, some looking tossed onto a bank or beach, and submerged wrecks with only the mast and rigging sticking up out of the water. These sights are particularly disturbing for us to witness, like seeing giant carcasses discarded willy-nilly along the path of an angry beast. I hope the owners of those boats are safe, even if their vessels have perished.

We took another day off in Melbourne, so named because the first postmaster here came from Melbourne, Australia. At ICW mile 918, the weather has finally turned tropical, and we stopped in order to enjoy the ocean beach, which is just a short walk from the dinghy dock. This is really the first time since September that I have needed to apply sunscreen anywhere other than my face, and it feels great to shed my layers of sweatshirts and leggings. We didn’t do any swimming; the air and water temps are just not high enough to be really inviting. But we are getting ever closer to our tropical island dream destination. We will be in Fort Lauderdale in a few days. Mile 1064 – and then to the Bahamas. Here we come!