These pictures are from a sailing trip I took with Bill Plywaski and his boat Aeolian from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida down through Miami and Biscayne Bay from March 10-27, 2006. We flew in Friday morning on the red-eye from Denver and spent the next several days preparing the boat for sea. We repaired a portion of the rub rail that had been damaged when hurrican Wilma came through in Fall 2005 and pounded the boat into the dock. We then mounted the main sail and the genoa, cleaned up the interior which was piled high with boxes, and headed out to sea on Thursday, March 16th. After clearing all of the bridges on the New River to Port Everglades (Ft Lauderdale), we headed down the Atlantic coast to Miami and through Government Cut. We anchored off of Key Biscayne the first night.
We then headed down the bay to No Name Harbor and then on to Elliot Key. Elliot key was saved from development in the 1960s and is a dedicated nature preserve and state park today. I rowed the dinghy for 2 hours to the ranger station for a shower and a walk around the island. On the way back, the dinghy started loosing air and the wind was pushing me out to sea. I had no radio, and was starting to wonder if I would make it out to the boat when a nice guy named Roger, a former CEO of Citrix, motored up on his jetski and offered me a tow back to the boat. Thanks Roger!
On sunday night, the few hundred boats that had flocked to the anchorage where we were up and moved out, leaving us and another couple of boats to a peaceful night without blasting music and motor boat partiers. We then headed back north to Key Biscayne again, which gave me a chance to tour the lighthouse. With my luck, they didn't do tours on Tuesday or Wednesday, but the gate was open and a ranger invited me to go in. They were setting up to film an episode of Aquaman, an upcomming TV series, and power cables were layed out everywhere. The ranger standing by allowed me to go up to the top of the lighthouse and look around, and later came by and let me in to look at the lighthouse operator's house. The rangers at Key Biscayne state park were extremely nice, informative, and are clearly very interested in the park they work at.
As the weather started to deteriorate on Thursday with a low pressure system sitting off the coast dragging a slow moving cold front through the area, we left No Name Harbor. As Captain Ken, a full-time sailboat resident we met there pointed out, it only takes one boat with a poorly set anchor to cause chaos in the harbor. The weather hit us hard, with blowing winds, torrential rain, and a lot of lightening. Fortunately, I was getting better at setting the anchor, and was amazed that we did not drag.
Finally, we took another short hop north and anchored off of the bridge by Miami. We spent several days here waiting for a weather window to get home and working on the poor overheating engine. Each day I would try to convince Bill that we needed to head back, and each day he would push off leaving another day. We spent a lot of time working on the engine trying to get the sea water cooling system to work right. Finally, Sunday came around, and with our plane departing Monday afternoon, we had to get home. We slowly motored out of Miami with the over temperature alarm beeping intermittently. Once we could see open water, we hoisted the main and shut the engine down. We spent all day taking back and forth, with winds from due north preventing us from sailing direct to our destination. After sailing all day long and falling a few miles short of our destination as the sun started setting, Bill took advantage of the tow insurance he had been paying for years, and called for a tow the remainder of the way in. Even under tow going several times faster than sailing, it took us another few hours to get back to Port Everglades and through the bridges back to the dock. It was by far one of the longest days, and yet some of the best sailing, in my opinion, of the entire trip!
Epilogue: "seamanship" as a term encompasses many aspects of nautical fun and games, from travelling under sail, to motor repair, knot tying (marline spike seamanship), navigation, astronomy, gastronomy, and boat maintenence. As Bill was fond of saying when I would get frustrated by spending another day not out on the water, "this is ALL sailing!" It is a passtime, like my interest in flying, that encompasses such a broad range of skills and knowledge that makes it so fascinating. To the experienced seaman, travelling from point A to point B is almost just a biproduct of being on the boat and doing all of the things a mariner does. For me, travelling is what it is all about. In addition, this trip provided time for me to reflect on my life, to learn to appreciate the things I have back home, and to break out of a routine that can sometimes be stifling to the imagination. I came back with a new attitude, a new sun tan, and a level of relaxation that I had not acheived in a long time. Someday, I hope to own my own boat, and travel to wherever the winds will take me.
