We’re currently at Chub Cay, in the southern Berry Islands of the Bahamas. We sprung for a night at the Chub Cay Marina. We needed a break. It was a slog getting here (quite a story, actually!), but we’ll tell you about it later. The queasiness, salt-spray-all-over-everything and that little dash of terror last night are all still a little too fresh.

Instead, I’d like to tell you about the good times and the bad times we had in the Sunshine State. As it seems is becoming my custom, I’ll tell you what we’ve been up to while doing some laundry (salt spray be gone). I could be here a while…the two washing machines I’m monopolizing sound like they’re gasping for water.

Florida’s east coast has been broken down into a few chunks (I believe by clever marketing people); “The First Coast“; “The Space Coast“, “The Treasure Coast” and “The Gold Coast“. At the speed we cruised through, we were able to get a pretty good look at all of them.

The First Coast

Fernandina Beach, Florida (02-Nov-2012)

After our tour of Cumberland Island, Georgia, we made the short trip south to Fernandina Beach, Florida. We stopped at the Fernandina Harbor Marina fuel dock to fill up and get water, and we decided to pick up one of their mooring balls for $20. It’s a pretty good deal because it includes showers & pump-out (I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about pump-outs later).

By the time we tied up to our twenty-dollar mooring ball, it was dark. We came ashore anyways because we wanted abundant-hot-water showers. Phill thinks the boater’s lounge at Fernandina was the best he’s seen in all our stops so far. It has floor to ceiling glass walls, a comfy couch and a big screen TV. It also has one of the biggest book exchanges we’ve seen (most marinas have book exchanges – they’re leave-a-book/take-a-book shelves). After our showers we watched the TV for a while and were reminded how easily we can be mesmerized into wasting a lot of time watching something totally stupid.

That’s about it for our first stop in Florida. We went back to the boat to sleep after our little TV stint, then got up early the next morning to go “on the outside” to St. Augustine.

St. Augustine, Florida (03 to 07-Nov-2012)

We left the Intracoastal waterway at Fernandina Beach to make the passage to St. Augustine via the ocean (or “on the outside” as they say). Phill probably won’t love me telling you this but sometimes he likes to sing; it’s quite endearing. Anyhow, going “on the outside” inspired him to sing that Eminem song – “…two trailer park girls go ’round the outside, ’round the outside, ’round the outside…”. He sang it a lot.

We had a really nice sail all the way, no problems. We saw a few dolphins and had fun watching the terns that seemed to follow us for several miles (we have a field guide to north atlantic birds, so we’re pretty sure they were terns). We saw this little bird-world injustice play out many times; one tern would work hard, dive and catch a fish only to be harassed by bigger terns who would eventually make it drop the fish it caught so they could have easy-pickins. Sometimes the terns would fly circles around our mast until the fish was finally dropped.

The St. Augustine inlet shifts frequently, so the buoys marking the channel aren’t all shown on the chart and entering the inlet for the first time can be very confusing. We had a few tense moments when we didn’t know if we were where we should be, but we managed to find our way in. What fellow travellers on Serendipity went through could very easily have happened to us.

Here are a few of the sights on the way to our $20 mooring ball (showers, water, pump-out included) at the St. Augustine muni marina:

We didn’t do much the first evening…just dinghied ashore to check out the marina facilities and walk around the waterfront. Before the internal cruising curfew kicked in, we went to the A1A Brewpub to sample the beer and watch some live music. Guitars, a fiddle and a banjo! (By the way, we picked up a banjo in Fort Lauderdale! 🙂 ) St. Augustine is a neat place. If you like live music, there’s something going on everyday of the week – including Sunday.

The next day we toured the Castillo de San Marcos.

The park rangers gave us an interesting presentation on cannons and various types of “shot” used by the different holders of the fort throughout its history. “Hot Shot”, for example, was heated shot designed to set fire to an enemy’s vessel.

Most of the cannons had faces, apparently of saints.

“La Necessaria” is the bathroom/washroom, whatever you like to say. They say “restroom” here in the US. We had problems with the ship’s necessaria, but we’ll tell you about that later. Remember I said I’d tell you more than you ever wanted to know about pump-outs?

After our tour, we took a nap under this tree. I can’t remember the last time I had a nap outside, let alone under a nice tree (probably when I was a kid…).

The next day we rode the bike to the Sailor’s Exchange; some of what we saw along the way…

We stopped for lunch at the Back 40 Urban Cafe. Great lunch, strange art.

St. Augustine is a beautiful town, but we ended up staying two days longer than we wanted to due to weather. That was silly – compared to the weather we’ve seen since then, those “bad weather days” were walks in the park, and in hind sight, we should have kept moving. Oh well, live and learn.

The Space Coast

Daytona Beach to Melbourne, Florida (07-Nov to 09-Nov-2012)

Before we left St. Augustine, while we were getting fuel, we talked to the captain of a “mega-yacht” tied up near the fuel dock. He was as interested in what we were doing as we were in what he was doing. He said “You sailors…you can really stretch a buck. We burned 1300 gallons of diesel getting here.“.  That’s $5707 at that day’s price…in 14 hours we later learned!!! By the way…being the captain of one of those mega-yachts looks like great work if you can get it.

Our next stop was Daytona Beach, part of Florida’s “Space Coast”.  We didn’t even get off the boat. Early supper, asleep by nine.

Then we anchored in Titusville, Florida, and saw the Kennedy Space Centre on the way there.

The next day, we had to make a quick stop in Melbourne to pick up parts for the Ship’s Necessaria. It was quite an operation, as the boat was bucking worse than it was at the 79th St. Boat Basin. We had to anchor in a less than ideal spot, lower the dinghy in uncomfortable waves, mount the outboard, load up the bike and get to shore to find the parts place without losing anything overboard.

The anchorage was so bad, one of us had to stay with the boat while the other went to shore (Phill took the tougher job of going to shore). We were so pooped that day, we went to bed at 7:30! I know babies with later bed times than that!

The Treasure Coast

Vero Beach to Hobe Sound, Florida (10-Nov to 14-Nov-2012)

I think I already told you about Vero Beach and Hobe Sound, Florida. We got stuck at Vero Beach for four nights, where we prepped a few jobs we were planning to tackle in Fort Lauderdale.

The Gold Coast

Lantana to Maimi, Florida (15-Nov to 08-Dec-2012)

There are many, many bridges along the ICW in Florida whose schedules you have to navigate. On the way to Lantana, our last stop before Fort Lauderdale, we ended up in a caravan of boats. It was funny to listen to the different captains talking to the bridge tenders over the radio (you have to call the bridge tenders over the VHF radio to tell them you’re on the way and would like an opening, as well as the name of your vessel and its home port).

We anchored at Lantana and just stayed on board that night. We arrived at the Las Olas Marina in Fort Lauderdale around 3 pm the next day. We stayed at that slip I showed you from November 16th to November 27th. Eleven days!! Fort Lauderdale is nice, but not that nice. What kept us in Fort Lauderdale (and we were/are reluctant to tell you this) was our leaking holding tank.

The rest of this material may not be suitable for all readers (thanks Carl).

For those of you who don’t know, a holding tank is a large receptacle on a sailboat that holds poop and pee. Sorry to be so blunt, but everybody poops and it’s gotta go somewhere, right? Every few days, when you stop at a marina, you get the thing pumped out. Pump-outs can cost up to 20 bucks, so that $20 all-inclusive mooring fee I told you about is a pretty good deal.

Ours sprung a leak in Swansboro, North Carolina. That’s the unexpected boat chores that kept us working until 10 that night. I was going to tell you all about it then (“The Swansboro Kakastorm!“), but Phill thought it was way too much information. Anyhow, we got that all cleaned up – thoroughly, like it never happened – for those of you who are considering visiting us on the boat. Really, it’s like it never happened. The boat is more pristine, in fact, than it ever would have been had it not happened.

We patched the leak, but upon further inspection, it was evident that the tank could no longer be trusted, so we set the wheels in motion to replace it in Fort Lauderdale.

So, the truth is out. We had to replace our holding tank, which is a big, unpleasant job, as you can imagine. It also required a lot of logistics (measuring, ordering parts, measuring again, getting tools, driving around to pick it all up, getting stalled out because parts aren’t there, measuring again, and on and on).

We* also replaced all the plumbing with state of the art, guaranteed-will-never-smell-bad conduits. We also replaced pumps and valves and fittings. So, like I said, the boat is better than it was before the leak. So, someone come visit us okay?

*when I say “we” it sounds like my role was more hands-on than it was; my contribution was more on the logistics side of the project

So we didn’t get to enjoy Fort Lauderdale, but we got to know it. We can drive around that town like locals now. By the way, we chose Fort Lauderdale to fix up the boat, including its holding tank, because you can get anything you need there. It’s the “cruising capital of the US”, and the dockage rate (we had to be at a dock for this job) was reasonable – $1.45/ft. Also, Raritan Engineering, the company that made our very excellent new tank has an outpost there.

It wasn’t all work. We took a stroll on the beach one day…

…where you find the ubiquitous t-shirt shop. This is a gross one, but what we were doing on this stop of our journey was gross, so we took a picture.

These aren’t the mega yachts I wanted to show you – they’re not even half the size of the ones I was thinking of…

But another thing that happened in Fort Lauderdale is that Phill’s iPhone sort of gave out and we had it replaced. There were some photos we didn’t back up, and the mega yachts were among them.

Miami was only a half day away, and we arrived there November 28th. We stayed in Sunset Lake, finishing a few boat jobs and listening to the weather a couple of times a day to pick a good day to cross to the Bahamas. Neither Phill or I is a weather expert, so after sifting through all the weather information out there, we decided to invest in a custom weather and routing plan from Chris Parker. It’s been a big help. He does daily weather reports over the SSB (we’ve been meaning to thank Brian from NSC who helped us get ours working), or by webcast when we have access to the Internet.

We finally left Sunset Lake December 7th to go to the Miami Beach Marina to refuel, get water and some last minute provisioning (there’s a Publix very close to the marina). Here’s some footage of us going under our last brige (yippee!) on our way to the marina.

And here’s a picture of our last sunset in the US. We left for Bimini around 3:30 the next morning.

Which brings us to the end of this leg of our trip. I’m proud of us. We did alright.