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| This is the view from our anchored boat to where we go with our dinghy to get to shore. There are several places for boater's dinghies to tie up depending on where you want to go or what you need to do. |
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| One place to tie up the dinghy is along this canal which serves the city as a drainage swain. Norma watched a huge manatee just wallow down the canal one day as we tied up the dinghy but you must watch closely or you would never see it since the manatee moves so slowly and only surfaces intermittently to breath. Jay is tying a small plastic fender to protect the rubber dinghy from the sharp razor clams that grow along the walls. He will lock the dinghy from the stern to a guardrail post with a steel cable and lock just to help keep folks honest. We really have one of the oldest dinghies and outboard motors so a thief could pick a much nicer dinghy if they really decided to take one. However, it is the only dinghy we have so we lock it when we leave it. |
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| So you ask "Why are you waiting in Miami- why not travel on across the Gulf Stream?" The immediate reason is this ice cube tray. The longer range reason is a favorable weather window to make the passage. Jay designed and built a wonderful refrigerator/freezer and we can make ice cubes with this tray which we enjoy very much. However on Monday morning we determined the tray had developed a hole and was leaking. SeaFrost, the maker from NH, sent new trays to us in Miami but with an "almost correct" zipcode. The trays were delivered to Palm Beach instead of Miami. So we decided to wait for them to come on Wed. We have spares of lots of parts on board but left the spare tray at home. So now we have a few more days to make preparations. |
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| Jay and his new favorite fix it tool - Gorilla tape. He mended a hole in the air pump for the dinghy and he temporarily mended our leaky ice cube tray with it. |
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| The long range reason to wait is to use these kinds of weather maps available at passageweather.com and windfinder.com to determine a favorable 2-3 day window of winds and weather to leave No Name Harbor in lower Biscayne Bay,FL and sail across the Gulf Stream to Triangle Rock below Bimini and then sail on to Nassau. That's the plan but we will have lots of alternate possible routes to use in case things change along the way. You can see the different current strengths of the Gulf Stream in this sample. |
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| This one shows the surface winds off Florida's southeast coast where we'll depart and the Bahama islands where we'll head. Lots to study and ponder -pretty fascinating to watch it change each day and for the forecast. We'll keep watching and keep you posted when we see a window open up for us with the right winds and weather. |
