April 25 26 Beaufort to River Dunes Marina Oriental NC and Lay Day There 28 7 Miles

At 8:10, we had help from the Beaufort Docks staff  "springing" us off the docks so our stern was swung out and we could back out safely. (They hold a line from our stern on the end of the dock while we go in reverse while trying to steer out. It works!)  This was the time of my choosing, but about 10 minutes too soon, resulting in a wait of that duration for the 8:30 opening of the Beaufort Bascule Bridge.
Once clear of the bridge we went perhaps a hundred fifty yards and then aground in mud. There is a fork in the watery path, of which we have to take the right because the left fork was silted in years ago. Mindful of that, I was so vigilant to to not take the right that I took a left, but at  earlier fork, and into a channel that was too shallow for ILENE at low tide. It was low tide so I knew we would float off eventually. But after half an hour I tried another trick. I swung the boom far out to starboard and hung my weight way over the side of the boat to heel her, just a few degrees, to break the contact of the keel with the mud, while Lene gunned the diesel. We were off again, delayed by half an hour, but no worse for wear. It seems I make more mistakes first thing in the morning. This is something to watch out for.
From then on, the only problem was the tide which slowed our progress up the Beaufort River, and through Adams Creek. With low tide at Beaufort at about 9, I thought we would have the help of a flooding tide pushing us on our way up. No such luck. About ten miles up is a high bridge and there the low was at 10:30. I put up the small jib but furled it soon, when it was obvious that there was NO apparent wind to breathe life into it. Even in the broad Neuse River, which we beat down in 2012, there was no wind. Our depth sounder stopped working for about ten minutes but then came back to life while entering River Dunes off Broad Creek. This place was dredged out of the pine forests since our chart was published and has about 160 docks constructed, less than half the number when it is fully built out. They try to make it feel like a Yacht Club, with its own Burgee and Clubhouse with library.

ILENE is at extreme right

We took on a load of fuel at their fuel dock at 3:30, having motored a lot since Jekyll Island, and got on our dock at 4:00.  The rain which had looked threatening all day, held off until the evening and night and during our lay day.
I washed the topsides, cleaned off the rust stains leading from the anchor chain down the outer edge of the starboard side of the deck, where the salt water washdown pump washes the rust particles it takes off the anchor chain, and then waxed this strip to try to keep the rust out in the near future. One shouldnt wax the nonskid deck; it is made rough on purpose. But this narrow strip is now waxed and I have to be careful to tell Lene not to place her feet at the outer edge.
We met some interesting people on our neighboring boats, including a Canadian man on a Catalina 42 with a 185 pound Pyrenese. We dined at the River Dunes Clubhouses dining room, only serving ten dinners that night, in addition to those for a wedding party above. Good food here.
On our day day we were picked up by Bill and Sandy, and served a delicious brunch of baked french toast with ALL the trimmings in their home, with its commanding view of the Neuse. They picked us up at 9 and brought us back at 2:30, so we had a good long time for discussing boats, destinations, books, politics, families, etc.
River Dunes is a relatively new marina, with good wifi and showers. They have an exercise room, pool and sauna. It is very well maintained, only $1.50 per foot and we cashed in the one-time-only Annapolis Boat Show special offer of two nights for the price of one. We liked it here when we visited at about this time of year in 2012 and just as much this time. We hope Bill and Sandy will visit us in NY, perhaps on their way on the loop around eastern Canada aboard m/v Lucille. From NY they would go north on the Hudson, through the Erie Canal, into the Great Lakes, east through the Thousand Islands, down the St. Lawrence River and, after Nova Scotia and Maine, back to North Carolina.

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April 12 14 Fernandina to Jekyll Islands Harbor Marina 23 9 Miles

Amazing! This is the 365th post to this blog since it began in October, 2010.

We were underway from 8:15 to 2:30.  We went very slowly up the west side and north side of Cumberland Island, across St. Andrews Sound and up Jekyll Creek, on the west side of Jekyll Island. A new stretch of the ICW for us. We went slow because we wanted to arrive when the tide was an hour before high. We passed the huge Kings Bay submarine base, but without sighting any of those killing machines. We passed Cumberland Landing,

on the north side of that island, where the packet boat used to land. We also passed the abandoned lighthouse and saw a buoy that has apparently detached from its mooring and washed ashore. The NY Times had a nice article about the men and women of the Coast Guard vessel that services the buoys in the NY area. In the ICW most "aids to navigation" are not buoys, but numbered red triangular and green square signs posted on pilings -- cheaper to maintain.

But this passage, with a few quite shallow patches, was deep water, 40 to 50 feet, deep enough for nuclear subs, so buoys are necessary.

This Marina is a well loved one, essentially a long dock along the east side of the creek to which all the transient boats are tied, this from its free postcard.

Here is ILENE under the live oak tree from the shower house, laundry and restaurant. Her mast, with its distinctive double forestay is in the center.

My first chore was to change ILENEs engine oil and filter. The marina takes waste oil for $2 per gallon, and I paid $2.50. We have a good pump that sucks waste oil out of the engine through the dip stick hole. You have to run the engine to get the oil hot before sucking it out but this was not a problem in that we had been running since early in the morning. But I realized that when you think you have gotten all the old oil out you have to wait to let more of it drip down to the bottom so you can suck out more of it. This time I pumped one pump to many and some oil gushed out from the bottom of the canister onto the cardboard box that I had set under it to catch spills. Im hoping I did not ruin this tool and will be able to fix it. I was also able to twist off the old oil filter without dropping it and spilling its dirty contents under the engine. Patience, and resting and drying hands just before it came off was the key. Lene helped out at the stage when you pour the dirty oil from the canister of the pump into the recently emptied oil cans for disposal. She steadied the receptacle and the funnel while I poured. No mess! Then, using a tiny bit of laundry detergent and a stiff brush, I got rid of 99% of the remaining one percent of the pelican poop from the blue canvas.
 The Marina is extremely friendly and provides good, movie watching quality, wifi; Lene has watched a lot of TV shows. They also have bicycles and a golf cart, which we used for the limit of 90 minutes per usage, for shopping at the IGA.

It is a very small store with limited selection and high prices on the east (Atlantic) side of the island, which is being developed with homes and hotels. The one drawback is insects, which bite, especially Lene. Rain has been predicted for the last week, including very high probability several of the days, but it did not come. During this passage the grey lowering skies suggested rain but it did not come until about an hour after our arrival, and lasted for about eight hours.
Because we were spending three nights and two days here, I asked the marina staff for the names of people who wash bottoms, change oil of outboards and align propeller shafts. Leo Ross, 912-266-1323, looked at the alignment, first. "Well", he said, "with the problem being intermittent and only at certain speeds, it might not be an alignment problem at all. Lets take a look."  I had cleared out the aft compartment so everything was ready for him. "Whats this? A motor mount bolt!" he quickly noted, picking it up from the bilge. It seems that the engine was held on its shock absorbing mounts by only three of the four bolts and those three were loose too. And the flange at the forward end of the propeller shaft, which is held in place on the propeller by two set screws, was also loose! After everything was nice and tight, I ran the engine at pretty high speeds in forward and reverse while tied to the dock and so far it looks good, very good indeed. But the acid test will be trying this while underway.
As to the outboard, it needed both its engine oil, which I had, and its lube oil, which I did not have, to be replaced after its 20 hour break in period. And the latter requires a special tool to force the new oil in from the bottom hole until it flows out of the top hole. I will get that tool for next time. Leo went to Westmarine on his break and bought the lube oil. He let me help him and taught me how to do this, including whacking the screwdriver with a hammer to shake lose the tight seal.

Leo looks like a refugee from that Dynasty Duck program but he is a set man, a good teacher, knowledgeable and charges a very fair amount A diver came and scrubbed the bottom and reported that my zincs have 75 to 80 percent left but that the wheel that, when not clogged by seaweed tells us how fast the boat is moving through the water (as compared to over the ground), is broken.
With all of the repair activities we did get time to use the pool and hot club, or do the sightseeing I would have liked. They have a free museum which also offers a $16 guided tour train ride through the historic old town district on the islands western side, which the Macys and Goodyears and other people of wealth set up in the 1890s. A reason to come back! Our last evening we did have a pretty good meal at the annex of the historic dowager but quite busy Jekyll Island Club Hotel, where the rich hob nobbed -- and still do. The Club sent over a van to pick us up and bring us back to the Marina.

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March 21 22 Lake Boca to the North Palm Beach Marina and Lay Day There 31 Miles 12 Bridges

We hauled our anchor at 7:15 for the 7:30 opening of our first bridge and motored all the way, tying up port side to, at this lovely marina at 2 pm. More mega houses (but this is not a real estate blog) and in Palm Beach, we saw the largest aggregation of mega yachts in one place since St. Maarten. This is another of the places where very wealthy people congregate. There is a boat show next week and this may have attracted some of the BIG boats. The last of the bridges, the Flagler Memorial in Palm Beach, was the site of the most congestion I have ever seen at a bridge: about thirty boats, half going north and half south, were traffic jammed near the bridge before its opening, trying to get through, one at a time, in the ten minutes that the tender allowed for the scheduled opening. We spent most of the passage with s/v Elle & I, from Vermont, a 35 foot Beneteau or Jeaneau. Alas, we never exchanged contact information with her people.

We missed one opening which cost us half an hour, because of my confusion. I made a list of the bridges, in consecutive order, with their names (because they wont answer your call unless you call them by name). I also figured out the distance between the bridges and the times between their openings such as some on the hour and half while others at 15 and 45 minutes after the hour. Most of the bridges open at such fixed times but some open on request. But some tenders try to accommodate boaters by delaying the opening for a few minutes while fast boats cool their heels, in order to let slower boats catch up, so both can get through with one opening and less disruption of automobile traffic. We were the beneficiaries of this practice at one bridge and the victims of it at another. These delays make it almost impossible to plan your speed between bridges since the time is shortened, but the distance is not.
North Palm Beach Marina was dredged out of the west side of the ICW and enjoys decent wifi and the best restrooms we have seen on this trip -- large, marbled, each with a large shower stall that does not drain into the drying area, a bench, lots of hooks and plenty of flow of hot water.
We had dinner at the restaurant of the marina with Erwin.

He has been such a huge help to me ever since I joined the Harlem in 1990 --Wow, that 25 years ago! The list of favors is so long that I couldnt include it here. But we talked about several of the prominent ones over dinner, including the time he spent two days taking the head off the Atomic-4 gas engine of my first boat, machining the surface smooth again and reinstalling it with gasket, all just days before a two week Club Cruise. He said he would help me but in fact he did the work and I handed him tools. Erwin was Commodore of the Club for an unprecedented two terms, organizes fund raisers for the club and the annual weeks charter in the BVIs, is an accomplished Bermuda racer and a master engineer, mechanic and designer of boating things and breweries. We had a lovely and lively dinner with him before he drove us back to ILENE.
Our lay day here was just that. We did a cursory washdown of the topsides and a shopping trip to Publix (with a stop at a discount hardware store - I would have spent a lot more there but most of the tools did not say "stainless"). We went via the marinas free taxi service. Other than that I didnt do much of anything but loll around.
On our way south we went outside from the Lake Worth Inlet at North Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale, in a single day sail. But heading north we traversed a new part (for me) of the ICW with a stop at Lake Boca, and it took two passage days.

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March 4 Belle Island Anchorage Miami Beach to Cooleys Landing Marina Ft Lauderdale 35 6 Miles

An interesting passage. We pulled up the anchor at 9:45. The tide was helping us on the way out of Miami. The main ship channel was free of  cruise liners (on Wednesday) so we were able to use that channel without the police directing us to turn back, and requiring the more circuitous industrial route We had only one tow and barge to avoid.

But the wind was in our face and once we got to Government Cut proper, big rollers from the sea were coming directly in. Built up by ten to twenty knots of wind from the east or south east, over a long time and distance, those waves confronted the tide flowing out and produced waves up to ten feet high which tossed ILENE about. Our bow dove under some waves with salt water bathing the deck. Good thing the hatches were not just closed but dogged down very tight. we closed the companionway hatch cover just in case, but no salt water came that far back to enter the cabin. And when our bow was lifted high up by other waves, a few gallons of seawater entered the cockpit through the stern swim platform but drained quickly back out. The sails, our strong engine, could not be deployed to get us through this bad patch faster because the wind was in our faces. We do not give the kitties big breakfasts on such days and their crying was not from nausea but caused by fear and discomfort.
Once clear of the Cut and its extending sea walls we turned north, and put out the small jib and things stabilized a bit. But we were still close to the wind and only making 4.5 knots; not enough to get to our destination in time. So we changed to the genoa and with the wind now on or near our beam we made seven knots, on a rolly ride with five foot waves pushing on our starboard quarter. But at seven knots we were now going too fast -- we would get there too early. We had to arrive at our destination, a few miles up the New River, at 4 pm, when it would be slack tide. If we were earlier or later, the strong tidal flows in that river would make it difficult to get into the slips which lie perpendicular to the tidal flow. So about an hour before the waypoint marking our turn west into the Port Everglades Cut to Fort Lauderdale, we switched back to the small jib and slowed  back down to four knots.  We were also happy to have the self tacking small jib out because the turn to the west would involve a jibe. We had planned for the 3:30 opening of the 17th Street Bridge across the ICW in Ft. Laud, but sailing with just the small jib until a few hundred yards from the bridge, we still got there too early, and made the 3;00 opening. Better too early, which can be solved by slowing down, that too late, because there is a limit on how fast we can speed up.

This is someone elses idea of beauty and is big and probably fast and unusual in design and color and parked near Steven Spielbergs mega yacht that is pictured in the post from our early spring 2012 visit to this city.

So we had to slow down and solved this by drifting north in the ICW in neutral and maintained steerage  with the wind and tide until we turned left into the New River. We had a scare when we heard on the radio from a friendly power boat of New Yorkers that the railroad bridge, one of the four we passed under, was down for maintenance; it is normally up and out of the way except when a train comes. That would completely screw up our timing issue. But it went up again, just in time, and we had an easy landing and were all tied up by 4:15, talked with our new neighbors, took showers, a delicious steak dinner aboard and tried, without success, to watch Downton Abbey via WiFi.

Cooleys Landing and Marathon are both municipal marinas in Florida but they have diametrically opposite pricing policies to influence the length of ones stay. At Marathon they give a bargain price to those who stay long term. One night on a mooring at the monthly rate is only ten dollars, which is less than the price of dinghy docking and restroom use on a daily rate for those on anchor. Here in Fort Lauderdale we pay only $1 per foot per day for dockage with the BoatUS discount, but only for ten calendar days per calendar year, after which 20% higher rates apply. Here they incent short term stays unlike Marathon which favors those who stay for the long haul. We are peripatetic nomads and have never stayed on our boat anywhere for a month.

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January 2 Cooleys Landing Marina Ft Laud to Anchorage NE of Belle Isle Miami Beach 35 6 Miles

Backing out of the slip was complicated by my failure to untie the steering wheel or the line securing ILENE to the port aft piling. But these got done at 6:45 a.m. at slack water and we were off in dawns early light, down the New,

under the 17th Street bridge without a substantial wait and into the Atlantic for the run down the coast. We were near close hauled on port tack in ESE winds and I had put a reef in the main and used the small jib at first until we switched to the genoa for speed. We were 2/3 of a mile off the coast in water that was 20 to 30 feet deep. And it was a rough ride for the 25 outside miles. The kitties lost their breakfast and had to wait till we got in to be fed. I had thought to be able to sail in through Government Cut, the deep wide channel through the beach into Miami, but the seas were very turbulent with wind-built waves opposing out flowing current and the main could not be kept from jibing so we pulled the sails down and motored the rest of the way. Here is a view out to sea after we were in, with friend Rhonda and Marcs apartment among those on the left side. (See more below.)

The Main Channel through Miami Harbor to the city of Miami is a straight shot continuation of the Government Cut and had five cruise ships lined up on our port side. We got about one third of the way through this wide deep straight two mile long channel when a loud speaker from a power boat with blue flashing lights (law enforcement) got our attention : "TURN AROUND! THE MAIN CHANNEL IS CLOSED EXCEPT TO AUTHORIZED VESSELS!" So we did, and went counterclockwise around the other, south side of Purdy Island, which is loaded with commercial vessels including this large dredge (water is cleaning its teeth),

and west to the City of Miami and the ICW, on which we went north for about a mile under two open low bridges and one high bridge before having to wait ten minutes at the low Venetian Causeway bridge (all bridges to the right).

During the wait, a Towboat US boat came by and hailed us: "Arent you from City Island and the Huguenot YC?" "Yes", I said. It was Billy, formerly in charge of hauling boats at the Huegenot, now working here in Miami. Then it was two miles west to this nice little free anchorage NE of Belle Island, the easternmost of the islands strung together like beads by the Venetian Causeway, where we anchored in ten feet of water with 50 feet of snubbed chain. We are just SW of the huge Sunset Harbor Marina.

Dockage there is $4.00 per foot (and these guys run a whole lot of feet); we pay nothing. At about two pm as we were anchoring, inherently a very busy time, we were hailed by a large white trimaran that was leaving: "Hello Ilene!" We said hello and the lady aboard said "I know you from your blog!" Well lady, if you respond, I will be very pleased to edit this post to include information about you and your boat, where you are going, your home port, etc. Here are some of the other anchored boats, there were a lot more here when we arrived.  You can see a bit of the Venetian Causeway, the low horizontal white line, behind them.

Once settled we were hailed for the third time in an hour by our friend Jerry who with his wife Louise, sailed with us for a week in the British and US Virgin Islands early in 2012. After launching the dink I went to the dock, which Dean had told us about, and brought Jerry aboard for a cup of coffee. On rfeturn i saw a sign on the dinghy dock said that you cant tie up for longer than 20 minutes. Jerry suggested that I ask the police. I did so politely, told him that we were visiting for a few days with friends who live here and wanted to go to dinners, the beach, sightseeing, shopping, etc. He said that the sign is to inhibit live aboards who stay here all year and those who leave their boats at the dock for a week while they fly north for the holidays: "Dont worry, you wont be towed." "Thank you very much officer."

The twin engine police boat is at the dock, the police station to the right and a ramp to the left is used by stand up paddleboarders.

That evening we were picked up by Rhonda and Mark and taken to their condo overlooking the Atlantic,

Government Cut, Fishers island, Biscayne Bay, Coconut Grove (our next stop) and the city of Miami. 
Wow what a view! And the apartment is the height of luxury.They let us take showers, lubricated us and we had dinner with them at Ciba, an Italian restaurant that opened less than a month ago. It has lovely decor, great service and, in our opinion, food that is just not remarkable. Rhonda is a friend of Lene from grammar school; they go back a ways. The girls had a good time together and we guys kept each other amused.

They were flying back to New York for a week the next day and gave us their last night in town, our first, at the end of a full day.

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