Key West bound

We are underway "southbound," which here is really closer to westbound, in the Hawk Channel, on the final leg of our journey to Key West. We have a slip booked at the city marina for two weeks, and the plotter says we should be docked by 3pm. It has been a somewhat eventful trip.

Six of the eight dolphins playing off our bow today. A good omen.

Saturday evening we walked down to one of our long-time favorites, Serafina, for dinner on their patio overlooking the Middle River. We discovered this place just by chance, back when we used to be able to anchor in the Middle River (now illegal), but it turns out to be one of the best Italian places in all of Fort Lauderdale, and we're happy it is just within walking distance of the yacht club.

Dinner at Serafina.

We get one night free at the club, and after that we have to pay. We took the second night to finish errands, but Sunday we wanted to be off the dock. That said, a pleasant Sunday is about the worst time to navigate the ICW through Fort Lauderdale, and we decided to just move to the adjacent Sunrise Bay anchorage. The club dockmaster was happy to let us stay on the dock all day, but the anchorage fills up with day boats on the weekends, and so we dropped lines first thing to get a good spot (map). We splashed the tender and came right back to the club for the brunch buffet.

Obligatory beach shot from the Broadwalk, for our friends and family in the wintry north.

One of the things we usually do at this anchorage is tender down to Coconuts, another of our perennial favorites, for dinner, and at dinner time we tried to do just that. Weekend traffic in the concrete-lined ICW made for a choppy mess, which might have been tolerable had we been able to plane, but that's only allowed on weekdays (I often joke that the manatees in Fort Lauderdale have calendars). After bashing our way over two footers down to the Middle River we gave up and turned around, having a light snack at home. We were still pretty full from the giant brunch anyway.

The historic Hollywood Beach Resort, 100 this year, is still shuttered. I hear it might be razed.

Things are so much more peaceful on Monday, and we weighed anchor for the relatively short cruise through Port Everglades down to Hollywood, where we dropped the hook in our usual spot in the South Lake "key slot" (map). We noted the county has finally installed signage designating North Lake and South Lake as anchoring limitation areas, limited to 45 days in a six-month period.

New anchoring limit signs. This is North Lake, which formerly was packed with near-derelict boats.

I splashed the tender, gassed it up at the Hollywood Marina, and had my usual stroll on the Broadwalk. Our stealth tender landing is less accessible now, with the lone mooring ring buried under tree canopy, so I just tied up at GG's Waterfront. Later in the afternoon we took the tender down to stock up at the new waterfront Publix, near the Diplomat Hotel, which has its very own dock for boat-in provisioning. It was a nice store, if a bit on the small side, and much easier than the mountaineering I had to do to access the Walmart a little further along.

Taking the groceries out to the dock. So civilized.

In the evening we tendered back to GG's, where we met up with long-time friends and fellow Neoplan owners Steve and Harriet, who were in town on a visit and parked over at Yacht Haven in their "other bus," a Prevost. Regular readers may remember we sometimes parked our bus in their driveway when they lived here in Fort Lauderdale. It was great catching up with them, the first time in a long while, and we're glad our paths intersected here briefly.

The dock from the water.

We had a quiet night in Hollywood, weighing anchor in the morning for slog down the inside to Key Biscayne, running yet another gantlet of timed bridges. With a very low tide we were able to just squeak underneath the Hallandale Beach bridge without an opening, for the first time ever. We were disappointed to see that the docks at the Intracostal Mall are now entirely closed off, even in front of Duffy's.

The entire mall dock is now closed, likely because it is unsafe. I hope they reopen it.

The Miami Boat Show is coming right up, and we had to maneuver through some of the show prep. That includied some exhibitor boat that thought it was a good idea to cut right across the ICW just as a whole line of boats was making its way through a bridge opening.

Setting up the Miami boat show.

We had our sights set on the Key Biscayne Yacht club, and I had checked several times to see if they had room for us, but they did not. We figured to anchor off Nixon Beach and tender in to the club for dinner, as we've done in the past. When we arrived in the neighborhood, however, we realized it was calm enough to have a pleasant night anchored off No Name Harbor, a bit further along, which would save us a half hour in the morning. We dropped the hook there (map) and tendered in to the Boaters Grill for dinner and a walk.

Vector at anchor as seen from Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne.

Wednesday morning we go an early start for the outside run, leaving at low slack, which had us just skating over a couple of the shoals in the Biscayne Channel with barely a foot under keel. Once over the bar it was a bumpy ride until we passed Fowey Rock, the northern end of the reef.

We were having a fine cruise, if a bit more rolly than we had anticipated, but in the middle of the day things started to go pear-shaped. Louise came up from a routine engine room check, which she does every 90 minutes, and reported a burning smell in the engine room. We both spent time in there over the course of the next half hour trying to pin it down, and eventually I concluded it was coming from the engine belts. The belts have several thousand hours on them, so it was not out of the question that one was slipping.

Looking back at Cape Florida Light, in the park, as we depart the eponymous channel.

Then I notice an almost imperceptible wobble at the end of the coolant pump pulley, the only one of the three pulleys visible with the belt guard in place. There was no evidence of coolant coming out the pump weep hole, though, and the overflow bottle had a normal level. We opted to continue to the anchorage at reduced RPM, forego the daily engine run-up, and double the frequency of engine room checks. By the time we reached Rodriguez Key the wobble had become more noticeable.

We worked our way into the shallows behind Rodriguez for whatever meager protection it might offer and dropped the hook (map). We turned on the engine room fan so it might be tolerable to work in there after dinner, splashed the tender, and headed toward Key Largo for dinner. We did not get far; it's a two mile tender ride, and we got so beat up in the first half mile that we turned around and I grilled sausages for dinner instead.

Sunset over Rodriguez Key in Key Largo.

After dinner I pulled the belt guard off, loosened the belts, and inspected everything. As I feared, there was lots of end play in the pump pulley, suggesting the bearings were going. Long-time readers may remember that we've been here before, replacing the pump in Florence. Alabama. We later had the old pump rebuilt by a friend of ours in the commercial pump business while were in New Orleans, and I set it aside as a spare for "some day." I spent hours poring over engine manuals and the photos from the last time before turning in for the night. The original pump lasted just 3,300 hours, and this one made it twice as long, so it's hard to complain.

Spare pump. The guys who rebuilt it gave it a fresh coat of white paint.

I had the pump and enough gaskets to do the job, and now we were were faced with a decision: spend the day at Rodriguez and do it right there, turn around and head back to Miami, or continue on to either a calmer anchorage or Marathon. The bounciness of the Rodriguez anchorage and the difficulty of getting ashore for any needed parts or supplies, as driven home by our dinner about-face, eliminated that option. It would also be a very bad place to be stuck should something go wrong and we needed to wait on parts or help.

These guys surfing the Flowrider at Margaritaville Resort Hollywood were pretty good.

The lack of any bail-out anchorages on the full day back to Miami persuaded us the best course was to proceed to Marathon, where there was plenty of help, and at least two good bail-out anchorages en route if it came to that. We weighed anchor first thing and continued southbound in Hawk Channel at reduced RPM and with frequent engine room checks. I left the belt guard off and so we wore safety glasses in the ER. We also charged the batteries up with the generator before departure to take the load of the alternator and thus the belts.

The wobble visibly worsened throughout the day, ending any thoughts we might have entertained about limping all the way to Key West, where we already had a dock booked. I spent most of the day calling every marina in Marathon to see if we could get a dock; the anchorage just outside the harbor can be miserably bouncy, making for a couple of uncomfortable nights on top of difficult working conditions.

With the belt guard off the wobble was pretty evident.

One marina on the north side had room for us, at a staggering $375 per night, and we would have paid that, but the charts said there was less than 6' of depth on the way there, and the dozen extra miles around to that side would have put us in at dusk, leaving no fall-back. We decided to suck it up and tough it out in the anchorage, with a nice dinner at the Sunset Grill as our consolation.

One of our go-to joints on the Broadwalk has, sadly, closed.

We got an 11th-hour reprieve when one of the dockmasters I had been trying to reach all day got back to me just as we were making the turn toward the anchorage. In light of our circumstances she said she could put us on a partly busted-up face dock with no working power and she would charge us just $100 per night. When she agreed we could run our generator as needed and we would not need to leave the dock should the engine repair fall short, we jumped on it.

The marina in question is at the Skipjack Resort, which is on a canal about as far from the Boot Key Harbor entrance as you can get. Part of the channel that leads there is less than five feet deep, and we had to detour through the mooring field to get there, leading to quite a few stares en route. We made it without incident and were tied up at the Skipjack Marina (map) just before the dockmaster left at 5.

Docked at Skipjack. You can see where the dock has collapsed aft of our fashion plate and has been fenced off. It was a challenge to get tied up.

I had posted of our travails on one of my Facebook boating groups. That led to several offers of assistance in Marathon, including from some folks we've met before. As we were coming alongside the dock, the couple on the Defever 49 immediately in front of us recognized me from the post. They immediately offered us the use of their car while they would be away in Key West (via bus) and left their key where we could get it (we did not need it). Thanks, Josh!

With the belts off I was able to wiggle the pulley. A lot.

The resort has its own restaurant, a beach-bar joint with a Greek flair called The Blu Bistro, and we ate poolside at the bar. We had the pizza, which was a mistake; I'd suggest one of the Greek options instead. The pool was inviting but I never got the chance to try it. After dinner I had a long walk around Sombrero Island, passing the Dockside bar and restaurant, which was packed and had live music I could hear from every point on the island.

On my walk around Sombrero I passed the entrance to the government's powerful transmitter sending propaganda to Cuba.

Yesterday morning after coffee I started right in on the pump. Having already done this once before, things moved along pretty well and I had the engine drained and the pump off in a little over two hours. Unlike last time, where the fiber gasket came off in one piece and we were able to trace it to make a new one, this time it was unusable, and we ended up setting the new pump on the gasket material to trace it out.

Draining the coolant. One gallon at a time.

Getting the 32-pound pump back up against the engine block with that gasket still aligned is the hardest part of the job, and it took me most of 20 minutes with a pry bar and a lot of swearing to get the first couple of bolts started. In the end the whole job took less than six hours start to finish, a couple of hours faster than the first time I did it. I'm not really finished, because the system is full of tap water right now, which I will replace with proper coolant in Key West. The belt guard is also still off while we continue to watch for leaks.

Old pump removed. This is the forward end of the engine block.

The project kicked my sorry butt, and I skipped my PT exercises yesterday for the first time since I started them. I was showered and cleaned up just in time for dinner, and we walked across the highway to the Marathon Grill and Ale House, which we remembered from a few years ago. Not only did they have one of my favorite porters on tap, but we also stumbled into prime rib night and we shared a piece. Far from the best, but it was decent and a nice end to a difficult day. We stopped into the nearby Publix on the way home.

On our way back from dinner, a reminder of the original Overseas Railway linking the Keys.

This morning we left the harbor at a foot lower tide level than when we arrived. We glided over a couple of shoals with just 3" under the keel, and I again had to cut through the mooring field. We've had a nice push out in the channel and are making good time, but it has been pot floats akimbo and I've had to do a lot of dodging and weaving. A pod of eight dolphins played in our bow wave for a good ten minutes, which I take to be a sign of good luck.

Replacement pump installed. My grubby handprints are all over the fresh paint.

We are looking forward to a couple of weeks of downtime here in Key West, and lifting a glass or two with old friends. Of course I will have my fair share of projects to tackle at the dock, including replacing the coolant. My next post will most likely be when we are again under way on our way out.