Welcome to Miami

Sunday May 24 - Welcome to Miami - Visions of white sand beaches and beautiful people laying on the beach with a fruity drink in hand … AHHHHH … NOPE. Not for us. In addition to COVID-19 and the fact that Miami/Dade County was still not really open to tourists, we had some major things to fix on the boat. Our initial plan was to stay for two to three nights in Miami to give us a chance to look around; however, over the course of six days, we fixed the leak in the fiberglass in the bow, improved the reception we had with the Iridium Go by adding a bigger antenna and replaced the corroded harness on the bow thruster. In addition, we needed to find enough diesel Jerry Cans to carry on deck to get us from Miami to St Thomas. Joe drove all over South Florida looking for cans. Between his driving and the kindness of transient sailors next to us, we finally had enough.

Monday May 25- Luckily, my best friend Wanda (who is also Joe’s wife) was able to come join us for a few days. Our first full day in Miami (not counting arrival day) was laundry day. We had piles of stinky laundry that had accumulated over the Gulf crossing and my boat needed to smell better. All five of us piled into the rent car and carried what turned out to be about 10 loads of laundry to a local laundromat (about $60 in coins). In addition to masks on in the hot laundry, the skies opened up and we were in the middle of a huge storm. Water was rising in the streets and quickly was above the door frame of the building. David, Joe and Ashton were outside the door and Wanda and I were stuck inside. The laundry worker couldn’t/wouldn’t open the door to let us out because she was going to flood the room if she did, but we didn’t want to get stuck there and flood the car. We kept pushing for her to open and she eventually let Wanda and I go out through a backdoor into an alley that lead to another shop that wasn’t flooding so we could get to our car. It rained like that all day.

Tuesday May 26- was spent with Wanda and David working remote. Joe spent his time running around looking for parts for the bow thruster harness and Ashton and I defrosted the freezer and fridge. As it turns out, my fridge/freezer, in it’s current configuration, doesn’t work as well as it should when we run the engine 24/7 for days on end. The engine is located right next to the fridge box and all that heat kept my fridge at 44-48 degrees and my freezer barely at 32. That meant a lot of fresh supplies that got too warm and then refroze and/or completely spoiled. We threw away a lot of lunchmeat and bacon :(.

Wednesday May 27- we headed up to Ft Lauderdale where the beaches were open. The day started out beautiful, but buy the afternoon we had clouds and rain again, but we didn’t let that didn’t stop us. We ate at The Boatyard for lunch, where the food was amazing and the view was fantastic. The location had us nestled up in the canals looking at the HUGE boats coming and going throughout our meal. After lounging there, we cruised up and down the beachfront talking again about how different the ocean looks from the land to being out on it. We stopped for drinks on the beach at the Drunken Taco, then walked over to the beach for a few minutes between rain showers. Even with the rain it was a lovely day.

Also on Wednesday, Miami/Dade County opened their restaurants!! We were able to sit in a restaurant again and eat. You could only take your face covering off while sitting at the table (coming from Galveston County Texas before landing in Miami, we were not required to wear facial coverings anywhere at the time, so this was new to us) but being able to have dinner out and not cook on the boat was so nice!! It was also the day that we started looking for weather windows to head out towards the Bahamas and on to St Thomas. It was looking like Friday or Saturday was going to be our best bet, but because of our previous Friday departure, we decided to only look at Saturday.

Thursday May 28 - was again a beautiful day. Ashton and I walked around the area to the different stores and did a little shopping. We hit up Target, Ross and Publix for a few things while Wanda and David were working remotely and Joe was either running errands or fixing things. A special treat for the day involved our friends from RumAway, Tara and Travis. They had flown into Ft Lauderdale for some boat shopping and came over to have dinner on Verano. It was such a nice evening and felt so familiar for us all to be together as we used to back in Kemah.

Friday May 29 - found Ashton and I at Publix again to re-provision for all of the fresh food we either had to throw out or that was used up. There were luckily no limits on meat, cheese or eggs so we were able to buy it all at one time. When we got back from grocery shopping, we had to say goodbye to Wanda. She was headed home, but we planned to see her in St Thomas shortly after our arrival. While Joe took Wanda to the airport, David, Ashton and I took Verano to the fuel dock to get us ready to leave the next morning. It was quite the adventure as that fuel dock was very busy and all of the boats getting fuel were big. It took us over an hour to get on and off the dock and we didn’t hit anything. After settling back into our slip, we had one more dinner out. Outside of the face coverings going into and out of the restaurant, it seemed as normal as could be with live music during our dinner. It felt good.

Saturday May 30 - We left the dock at sunrise and headed out towards the Gulf Stream and the Bahamas. We had our special approval to stop for fuel in the Bahamas if needed because of COVID-19 and we were ready to start the next part of our adventure.

Until Next Time, Cindy

Miami to Long Island

The Gulf Crossing