Dedicated to Boatman Mark

This morning as we cast off our dock lines and leave Fort Pierce, Florida to begin our Great Loop, we dedicate this trip to our friend Boatman Mark, a friend we’ve not even met.

Five years ago Cathryn had a couple fainting episodes at work (in blog reader Gary’s office), and a couple months later ended up with a pacemaker.  Having always thought of herself as healthy and athletic, this was quite a shock. 18 months and 4 surgeries later, life returned completely to normal, but for awhile there, it was sometimes tough. To help cope, she joined an online forum for people with pacemakers. And that’s where Boatman Mark comes in.

This online forum is a place where folks post questions or information that might be helpful to others and establish friendships with other people with pacemakers. Cathryn had a long-time telephone friendship with Amy from Pittsburgh and even met Dominique from Denver a couple of times. She and Boatman Mark found they had lots in common and have had an email friendship since then, never talking on the telephone or meeting. Mark is the same age as Cathryn and got his pacemaker about the same time. His wife is named Kathryn, and they have two sons the same ages as our daughters. Mark and Kathy live on Long Island, and Mark has been a life-long boater who now owns a 30-foot Pursuit Express named “Keeper”.

He’s also a scuba diver (as are both of us) and is retired from the Coast Guard.  Mark is a military hero who has been involved in helping deal with a number of terrible incidents in America’s modern history, including the aftermath of 9/11.

Two years ago Cathryn asked Mark about his retirement plans after his wife Kathy stops teaching.  He wrote enthusiastically about something called The Great Loop, a journey he hopes to make. Cathryn Googled “The Great Loop”, and the rest is history: here we are beginning that journey! During our 18 months of Loop planning, Mark repeatedly offered us advice on types of boats to consider buying, and which diesel engines have great reputations and which ones to avoid.  He was a great resource when we got our boat survey done prior to closing the purchase on “Next To Me”.  He advised us about sea strainers, fuel manifolds and myriad other technical topics.

Our route north will take us up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway to New York City where we plan to anchor out behind the Statue of Liberty the night before entering the city’s harbor on the Hudson River to continue north to the Great Lakes. Before we pass NYC, we will meet Mark and Kathy for dinner on Long Island or in NYC. We have much to thank Mark for, as this trip would not be happening if not for him.  So . . . . here’s to Boatman Mark, a true friend, even though we’ve yet to meet. Thank you, Mark, for inspiring the dream that led to our 2012 great adventure!

Seattle and back to Boat, Sweet Boat

We had a whirlwind week in Seattle, including dinner with relatives and friends every night:  Bob’s sister Lynn and her husband David, our son Ryan and his fiancée Jaime,  daughter Mackenzie and her husband Matt, neighbors Hobie and Mary, and Mackenzie and Matt’s friends Valerie and Lance to celebrate Valerie’s 25th birthday while we spent the night at M&Ms house.

We also visited long-time friends Steve and Andrea and their son Jake, got our 2011 income tax return completed, mowed the lawn, and sister-in-law Lynn helped Cathryn (actually, Lynn mostly did it by herself) make five curtains for various windows on the boat!

We arrived in Seattle to find snow, spent 4 days in pouring rain, and the last two days in brilliant, cold sunshine. Bob made final arrangements with Tyler who will take care of the yard all season, and arranged to get the leaking washing machine repaired.  Whew!

Now we’re back on “Next To Me” at Harbour Isle Marina in Fort Pierce, Florida making truly final preparations to take off Saturday and officially begin our Great Loop journey!  We spent another $600 on groceries today, completely filling both the refrigerator and freezer with fish, meat and perishables like vegetables, eggs and cheese.  OK, we also stocked up on “adult beverages”; one must be prepared for docktails, mustn't one?

Darrell, our invaluable “electronics guy”, installed the new 1800-watt inverter/charger and two new Group 31 batteries while we were in Seattle; so we’re now ready to anchor out as much as we please without having to worry about the refrigerator going warm on us.

All we have left tomorrow is an oil change for the generator and a trip to the laundry so we’ll leave here with all our clothes, towels, bed sheets and throw rugs clean.

We’re happy to back on the boat!

Last Big Project

As mentioned previously, we learned on our shake-down cruise to the Florida Keys that our 25-year-old refrigerator and generator wouldn’t do the trick for the Loop while at anchor, which is where we plan to spend most nights.  We bought a new 110volt house refrigerator at Lowe’s, and today it arrived!  It only draws 6 amps when the compressor is running, and even less the rest of the time. Darrell, the guy who installed  our new electronics a month ago, assisted with the refrigerator move-in because he’ll also install an 1800-watt inverter and two Group 31 batteries to support the refrigerator and a handful of outlets in the galley and at the lower helm and upper helm for re-charging cell phones, computer, and running the davit.

We’ll let the photos tell the rest!

Doors off the old one, to make it skinny!

Lots of blue tape,  just in case. Note old refrigerator lying on its’ side on the sundeck.

Let’s see if we can avoid dropping it in the water, shall we?

Handy having your very own “crane”.

We got the whole population of the dock involved. Here’s Richard from across the dock. Steve from next door took some of the photos.

It worked:  out with the old!

In with the new.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? And this somewhat smaller refrigerator even leaves room for paper towel storage on top.

And with that, we’re off to Seattle to visit family and friends for a few days, check on the house (nephew Tom and his wife Sarah who are house-sitting this year kindly went away on vacation), and get our taxes done and submitted. 

Friends, Rain and Provisioning

Just as we found during the 3 winters we lived in an RV in Baja, Mexico, people who travel by boat are far from home, family and friends, so they reach out to others nearby who are living the same way they are.

Friday night Cort and Beth on “Turtles IV” invited everyone to docktails adjacent to their boat, and 25 people showed up, including us. We met lots of new folks, most of whom we’ll never see again as we leave here in two weeks, but it’s  interesting to compare the where-we’ve-been-and-where-we’re-going stories, see each other’s boats and discuss solutions to common problems. 

Last night we were invited for happy hour on Richard and Wendy’s boat across the dock from us – lively, interesting folks from Ottawa, Canada who live on their beautiful boat  half the year and in a house in Ottawa other times.

In other fun, we took our last 5-mile walk to the Saturday Farmer’s Market in downtown Fort Pierce.  In the photo above is Cathryn, running off with another man. Actually he is an 82-year-old guy who told us about running his first marathon 3 years ago, at 79! Always on the lookout for role models we hope to have the good fortune to emulate.

We also finally stopped in at the Manatee Museum on our way back, a small museum mostly targeted at kids, it seemed to us, but a nice break in the A/C during our otherwise hot walk.

We’re getting emails from people about rain. Bob’s sister Lynn back home says it’s raining, raining, raining there. Friend Gene is currently in an RV in Arizona but is headed to Kauai, Hawaii in a couple weeks and says they had 35 inches of rain there last WEEKEND, and roads and bridges were washed out.

And it’s raining here on the east coast of Florida, harder than the gentle  showers we’re accustomed to at home. We have to remember to close all the hatches and ports firmly before we go to bed or we’ll have to clean up another interior flood. On the other hand, we got a text message from daughter Adrienne yesterday telling us she and her fiancee Justin were on a ski mountain in Colorado eating lunch in t-shirts! What’s with that???

We’ve begun provisioning the boat for the true beginning of our Loop. While there will be grocery stores along the way of course, we won’t have a car so will be shopping on foot or bicycle, and the nearby grocery stores will often be small  Mom-and-Pop type places with limited selection.

So Friday we went to Publix and spent $537 on toilet paper, paper towels, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo and soap, canned soup and tuna, rice and lentils, jars of pasta sauce and anything else we have room to store and know won’t spoil.

We hope this will last us to the Chesapeake Bay where we know we’ll be near convenient, big grocery stores again. It took two shopping carts to get us out of there, and it felt like a scavenger hunt trying to find suitable storage space for all of it once we got it back to the boat.

More Work, More Play

Back in Fort Pierce, we’re determined to maintain a balance between work and play, unlike our first 6 weeks here. With that in mind, we worked all morning. Bob spent several hours washing the boat, removing dirt and vast quantities of salt that accumulated everywhere during our shake-down cruise. He also applied water-proofing to the top of the flybridge bimini, as we noted some leaks during our trip north in the heavy rainstorm, and cleaned all the isinglass.

Cathryn headed to the laundromat to get 4 loads of laundry done and made arrangements with a couple of contractors to keep their work moving forward.

That meant we got to play for the rest of the day. We went to the Navy Seal Museum here in Fort Pierce, the only one of its’ kind in the nation, and was it ever impressive! While we’ve always had great respect for the men and women who serve in our military, these guys (and yes, they’re all guys) are over-the-top amazing!

There were displays about World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm, as well as non-war efforts such as the actual Maersk Alabama lifeboat, for those who recall the astonishing news story of the Navy Seal rescue in 2009 of Captain Richard Phillips from a lifeboat after a Somali pirate hijacking that lasted 4 days. These are the same guys who undertook the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden more recently.  If you ever find yourself near Fort Pierce, this is worth a visit.

Captains Chris and Alyse Caldwell, the folks who trained us for 3 days in January, keep their boat in the same marina where we’re located and have a couple from New York on board for 5 days of training.  We always enjoy time with Chris and Alyse, and they wanted their current students to meet some recent “graduates” who have gone on to successful cruising (if our 500 mile journey to the Keys qualifies as such), so we invited the 4 of them for cocktails on our boat.  Alyse brought 2 pounds of delicious crawfish, and combined with other appetizers and drinks, the stories began. We also offered a tour of our boat.  It was a fun way to pass a couple of hours and ended long after dark, and well before the next heavy rainstorm began. We think we achieved the right balance for the day.

Shake-down Cruise: What We Learned

After 5 1/2 weeks of living on “Next To Me” in Harbour Isle Marina in Fort Pierce, we finally took off for an extended shake-down cruise:  2 weeks in the Florida Keys, a 503 mile round-trip journey.  We returned last night and are glad we made the journey as we learned a lot:

1.  Cruising is more fun than sitting on a boat in a marina.

2. The south Florida scenery is no prettier than our Puget Sound home cruising grounds (mountains, waterfalls and dense, tall evergreen trees), but the palm trees, turquoise waters, and white sand beaches are certainly a match, and the warm air and water beats it hands down.

3.  We’re now capable of anchoring safely and securely enough to sleep well at night, a new skill. Only once did we fail to set the anchor securely on the first try, we figured it out right away, and immediately made a second try which was successful.

4. Navigating the ICW, communicating with bridge tenders via radio and managing busy bridge-openings, dealing with shallow water and a narrow channel was a little tension-inducing on the southbound leg of our journey, as we were still very much novices in a big, twin-screw vessel. On the northbound leg, 250 miles later, we felt relaxed and comfortable with these tasks, including leaving one of us alone at the helm at times while the other went below to take care of other tasks.

5. The NOAA weather forecasts sometimes use the same words we’re accustomed to hearing back home, but the experience is quite different because the geography and water are so different.  We’re still in the process of learning how this works, and expect to continue learning this the entire 6,000 mile journey, as the water and geography will continue to change.

6. We’re getting better at communicating information to each other: when, how much, how to say it, and how to interpret what each other says. Because we’re pretty good at this in our marriage, we thought there would be no learning curve while cruising, but that’s not been the case. We’re making progress.

7. Because the previous 15-year owner of our boat stayed in marinas while cruising and never anchored out, the boat has no inverter. We knew that, but thought we could maintain our refrigerator at proper cooling/freezing temps by running the 8KW generator a couple hours each morning and evening. After being on the hook for a week in Marathon with no electrical hook-up, we discovered that’s not the case. We found the refrigerator’s inside temp to be 58 and 62 on consecutive days, so had to throw out meat and other items. This afternoon we’re meeting with a contractor to figure out what to do in terms of refrigeration and power supply to solve this problem. We’ve had alternative refrigerators and power supplies in our 5th wheel trailer, but those are not suitable for the marine environment. We have more to learn.

8. This boat provides us with really comfortable living. We have everything we need and almost everything we want, and no complaints about any of it (except that refrigerator issue!)

So, the Shake-down Cruise was successful in telling us things we needed to know before we’d feel comfortable heading north on our 6,000 mile journey.  We’re getting close!

Last, we spent 30 minutes yesterday, a VERY windy day with small craft warnings, listening to a VHF radio conversation between a Skipper and the Coast Guard. The Skipper, who was off-shore in the Atlantic contacted the CG to report his sighting of an 18-f00t open aluminum boat with an outboard which appeared to be in distress. Turns out the Skipper on the radio was Captain of a 150-foot boat. He first reported the 2 men on the small boat were waving their life vests in the air suggesting they needed help . He then reported it appeared they were taking on water, then beginning to list and perhaps sink, then that they had capsized and the men were in the water. Meanwhile, the Skipper reported his crew deployed their 22-foot dinghy and were off to attempt a rescue. He finally reported they succeeded in bringing the two wet, cold men aboard, wrapped them in blankets, and eventually transferred them to a Coast Guard boat that also responded to the radio transmission. It was remarkable how calm, brief and professional both the Captain and the Coast Guard guy were throughout this conversation, and it reminded us the importance of knowing the proper way to handle such emergencies. Tragedy averted, though the boat did, in fact, sink! Whew, we were happy when it was over.

Are We in Florida or Seattle?

We had a relaxed, easy anchorage last night and are starting to think anchoring out isn’t so scary anymore. After having the experience of a sailboat drag it’s anchor at Sucia Island two summers ago and run into us at 5:30 a.m., we’ve been leery of anchoring and wondered whether we’d learn how to do it securely. Apparently the training we got from Captain Chris Yacht Services served us well, as we’ve anchored out a dozen times now without any problems.

This morning over coffee we checked the weather forecast and saw it would remain cool, cloudy and WINDY for most of the coming week. Because we need to get back to Fort Pierce to catch a flight to Seattle, we decided to head north despite the forecast. So we pulled up anchor and headed north. Guess what we faced?  High wind, cloudy skies, cold temperatures (for winter in Florida anyway) and gusts that knocked us around.  It felt just like boating in Seattle in May or June!  So we felt right at home. The only difference was  the ICW is narrower and more protected, so there are no big scary waves like on Puget Sound.  We had the entire ICW to ourselves today for 45 miles! We sometimes went 5 miles without seeing another moving boat, in sharp contrast to yesterday. 

On arrival at tonight’s anchorage in North Lake Worth we noted the boat anchored next to us was also flying a Great Loop burghee. We got on the Loop website and found their phone number via their boat name, so invited them to cocktail hour on our boat. Erwin and Marilyn arrived via dinghy at 5:30 and we talked non-stop for 1 1/2 hours about boat stuff, The Loop, family and hometowns. They’re from Michigan and are yet another friendly, knowledgeable, helpful couple. They started their Loop on Lake Michigan in summer 2010 and will complete it this summer, and they invited us to connect with them at their home on Lake Michigan this summer. What a treat!

We’re Not in The Keys Anymore!

We’re headed north at a faster clip then we’d intended, but our sense of caution about the weather patterns here, and the fact that we don’t really understand them yet, causes it to make sense.  At least to us.

We left Boca Chita (above) this morning with the intent of getting off of Biscayne Bay, a very large body of water, and into the better protected ICW before the coming cold front and its accompanying high winds which are expected to arrive on Sunday.  What we failed to consider was the fact that put us in the ICW on a sunny, if somewhat windy, weekend day.

Lots of folks were out enjoying the day.  Above is a floating hot dog stand, pulled up on a sand bar smack in the middle of the ICW and only 100 feet out of the channel.  They seemed to be doing a booming business, and we could smell the hamburgers on the grill as we passed.

All manner of watercraft were sighted, including a dozen youth on paddleboards, some apparently too new at it to stand up yet.

We doubt these were Somali pirates so enjoyed seeing a “pirate ship” in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Every night at sunset in the Keys it was a tradition for people to go out on the deck of their boat and blow a conch shell, like the statue above. Immediately as the sun went down, dozens could be heard in any crowded harbor. Cathryn says she’s going to bring hers (harvested at Grand Cayman island in the Caribbean)back from Seattle and make it one of our traditions.  Bob is a little skeptical, as is his nature.

Tonight we’re anchored out in Lettuce Lake (or maybe it’s Lake Santa Barbara, our sources don’t agree).  Did you see the recent news about the first Google Map War, between Nicaragua and Costa Rica? Google it, of course, to learn more.  We found it interesting.

Contrast the picture above of tonight's anchorage to the one at the top of this post and you’ll see why the post is titled:   We’re not in the Keys Anymore. It feels like worlds apart.

Plantation Key to Boca Chita

The weather forecast says something called a “cold front” will arrive in Florida this weekend. Temperatures in many of the places we’ve been recently are projected to plummet from 84 all the way to 72 degrees (highs for the day).  Imagine that! On the other hand, the wind is forecast to blow up to 25 knots for a couple of nights, and that IS more of a concern, so tomorrow we may try to find a protected location to batten down the hatches for a couple of nights and wait for this so-called cold front to pass.

Meanwhile, we had an uneventful travel day from Plantation Key, moving northeast through territory we covered in the other direction 10 days ago, and arrived at a new destination for the night 53 miles later. We’re on the tiny island of Boca Chita, formerly owned by Mr. Honeywell back in the 1930s (we gather he didn’t suffer as much economic devastation from the Great Depression as most people did).  He built a private lighthouse here, got into trouble with the government for doing so, and his island retreat was subsequently destroyed in a hurricane. So now it’s a National Park, and for $10 (senior discount from $20)we’re tied up to a concrete wall in a tiny harbor along with 21 other boats. It’s scenic and pleasant, except for the mosquitoes that arrived in huge droves promptly following sunset, which did not, for us, produce a green flash.  We remain happy and well.

For the first time on the trip our Verizon MiFi hasn’t really produced enough of a signal for satisfactory internet.  Oh, the deprivations we suffer!

Having Fun, Making Progress

Yesterday was our last day on a mooring ball in the Marathon City Marina.  We did a few chores to get ready to leave, and ended the day with cocktails on Jim and Sharon’s beautiful 40’ Albin, Blue Angel. We met them at the Looper’s event last Sunday, and they have completed the Loop twice already.  They’re from Michigan, but have lived full-time on a sailboat for 8 years, and now 5 years on their trawler, a 40-foot Albin. Jim and Sharon are mellow, knowledgeable, interesting people, and they told us about lots of great anchorages we can check out as we move north up the Intracoastal Waterway.  We hope to see them again in Michigan this August.

Today we pulled out of Marathon at 8am, and after getting fuel and water at a nearby marina, we headed back north to Plantation Key.  Cathryn has continued to be more timid than Bob about some aspects of dealing with this new boat, so today she broke through a few barriers. She piloted the boat for the  majority of today’s 50 miles,  including docking at the fuel dock.  Most importantly, at the end of the day, Cathryn took us into an unfamiliar marina with narrow fairways and docked us in a side-tie position (like parallel parking, not in a typical slip) between two much larger and expensive boats that she was worried about hitting.  And it went well!   She continues to work toward achieving “full Co-Captaincy”, which was a condition of Bob’s agreement to undertake this journey.

We have been in very shallow water almost all day, and there is only 3 feet of water beneath the boat here in the marina. We’re getting much more complacent about depth. So after a week on a mooring ball, and 3 nights anchoring out before that, we’re finally back in a marina, a very pretty one near Tavernier.

We plan to journey back to Fort Pierce more slowly than our trip down to the Keys, and hope to enjoy more anchorages and shorter travel days.