And those Hollywood nights...

We are anchored in South Lake, one of the "Hollywood Lakes" in Hollywood, Florida (map).  We dropped the hook here around 2pm yesterday, after a pleasant cruise from the New River docks.  We have had the entire lake to ourselves since we arrived.

This location is vaguely familiar to us, because we spent the first night of our very first trawler training cruise at the twin North Lake back in 2009.  We passed North Lake on our way here, and there were three boats anchored there; unfortunately, that lake is too shallow for Vector.  That cruise departed from (and returned to) the Dania Beach marina, which we also passed on our way here, and so we will be retracing our steps for this next stretch of the waterway, all the way down to Biscayne Bay.  I expect we will be in some of the same anchorages, as well, although Vector will not fit in as many places as that 40' sundeck trawler could (including its home marina, due to an 18' fixed bridge).

After leaving Port Everglades (the majority of which is actually in Hollywood, not Fort Lauderdale), we had to transit three drawbridges in succession to arrive here.  Each operates on a fixed schedule, and with several knots of current against us, I had to run at a much higher RPM than normal to make the openings.  Missing an opening by a few minutes means needing to station-keep for nearly half an hour waiting for the next one.  At one point I had it cranked up to 2,200 rpm, which is as fast as we ever go, just to make a little over five knots.

We took on 300 gallons of fuel yesterday, moving over to the designated fueling slip at the 10am slack.  The Anchor Petroleum truck pulled up just as we did, and the whole process took about a half hour or so, with me down in the engine room most of the time, flipping valves.  We ended up putting 80 gallons or so in each wing tank with the remainder topping up the belly tank, which means we have about 950 gallons on board.  That should be plenty for the remainder of our cruising here in Florida and will likely get us all the way back to Virginia, which is the last place we fueled, a full six months ago.

We'll stay right here at least another night.  It's a very nice anchorage -- quiet, and far enough away from the ICW proper that we can't feel the wakes.  The "keyhole" portion of the lake itself, including where we are anchored, is a no-wake zone.  The only traffic we've seen here is a trio of eight-woman skulls accompanied by a pair of tiny skiffs with anemic outboards, I would guess a university or club crew team who routinely practices here.

There are a handful of waterfront restaurants across the ICW from North Lake.  At least one has music late into the evening, we remember from our training cruise -- another reason why this anchorage is more pleasant than North Lake.  We'll probably splash the tender and head over to one of them for dinner this evening.

Incidentally, Hollywood is named after the more famous city in California, and these lakes were dredged by the founder of the city back in the 20s, using the spoils to make dry land for the surrounding homes.  It's had its ups and downs, but has enjoyed a great resurgence in the last quarter-century.  Thus we find ourselves again surrounded by million-dollar waterfront homes.  These, too, have docks, but there are no megayachts in this lake as there were in the canals of Fort Lauderdale.  The chart says the square part of the lake is only four feet deep, but we had reliable information that this is wildly inaccurate, and, in fact, it was 20'-30' deep until we reached the slot of the keyhole, where 13' depths allowed us to anchor on just 100' of chain.

We have weather moving in -- last night we had a gullywasher that cleaned all the salt off the parts of the boat we could not rinse while we were at the dock.  While things don't get all that rough in the ICW, we'll probably stay right here until it has passed completely, then continue south, hitting at least one more anchorage before Biscayne Bay and Miami itself.  Now that Fort Lauderdale, with its host of errands there, is behind us, I will use the time at anchor to get a few things done around the boat and on-line.

Riding our bow wave

Three dolphins joined us for several minutes, having a lazy ride up front. It's really a treat to be so close to these beautiful animals.

Just like downtown

We are safely tied up at the Fort Lauderdale Downtown City Docks (map).  The docks line both sides of the river for several blocks and across three bascule bridges; I requested a spot east of the first bridge so we would not have to contend with any openings.  We're on the north bank, a short walk from the shops and restaurants of Las Olas street.  I spun the boat around for a port-side tie and we put a scooter on the ground shortly after arriving.  Louise has already posted a few photos of our new digs.

En route from the anchorage yesterday we first stopped at our old friend, the Las Olas Marina, to use their pumpout.  All the T-heads were taken so I had to actually maneuver back into an inside slip first, but we went bow-in so it was fairly straightforward.  As a city facility, the pumpout is actually available free of charge to the public, but they don't have an easy-access dock for it.  The pumpouts here at the Downtown Docks are on the south bank, and there was not enough depth for us there when we arrived at low tide.

This is a great spot, with easy access to downtown, a Publix grocery store, and several transit options.  The price is right, too (for Fort Lauderdale, anyway), at about $1.40 a foot after discounts, including power, for a boat our size.  Next time we come through we might spend a few nights here and take in some of the local flavor.

On this visit our real objective was to get fuel and water, charge our batteries, and get me to Palm Beach for my eye doctor appointment today.  As I type, I am sitting on the Tri-Rail train heading north, after a free shuttle ride from downtown, just a block from our slip.  Louise will be joining me in Palm Beach on a later train, and Martin and Steph are driving down from Stuart to meet us for dinner.

We took two nights at the dock, and tomorrow morning we will move the boat a few hundred feet downriver to the designated fueling area on the south bank.  The fuel truck will meet us there to supply us with 300 gallons of diesel.  The price when I spoke to them yesterday was $3.45 per gallon, plus 6% sales tax -- the best I found anywhere from Fort Lauderdale to Miami.  We still have about 500 gallons aboard, but finding a place to get a truck to the boat is challenging so we're fueling now while we have the opportunity.

Last night we walked across the river to the Downtowner Saloon and ate outside, right on the water.  It's a real casual joint popular with the locals, a far cry from the uber-trendy places along Las Olas.  We both had burgers almost too large to finish.  We walked along the south bank for a ways on our way back -- lots of 90-130' yachts tied up along that stretch.

This morning we took advantage of having wheels to pick up a new BCD for Louise along with some dive weights, and once we get the regulator I just bought serviced, we'll have everything we need to go diving except the tanks.  We'll try to get in an instructional refresher dive in the next few weeks, so we will be ready to dive with our friends when they get underway (they have extra tanks and a compressor to fill them).  Louise is doing the grocery shopping now while the scooter is still on the ground.

After we fuel up tomorrow we will head south from Fort Lauderdale along the ICW.  I'm not sure how far we will get, which will depend in part on how long fueling takes.  We will most likely be anchored at one of the handful of spots on the way to Miami.

An odd angle

View of Vector from the 3rd Avenue bridge. In order to get the dinghy to sit flat with room to squeeze by to access the scooters, the chocks have to be slightly skewed. I guess if it's only noticeable from above like this, a bit of catty wampus is acceptable.

Storm clouds

Pink sky at night...

New digs on the New River

Kind of a different vibe.

Final morning in anchorage

This has been a great spot and we'll be back.

Cleaning the dinghy

Sean scrapes the hull.

Quiet anchorage

Before the weekend water skiing crowd arrives.

Sunday morning

Coffee and cat.

I'm experimenting with sending photos directly to the blog from my phone. Hopefully this will increase the picture to word ratio here.

- Louise

Another random week in paradise

Notwithstanding my last post, wherein I speculated that we would move the boat Monday or so, we are still right here at our pleasant anchorage in the Middle River.  Come Monday, we will have been here a full two weeks.  By then, we will more or less have to move, because two weeks is about how long our waste tank lasts, and we will need to pump out.

Part of the reason we are still here is that the long-term plan, which has always been in limbo, has had a new wrinkle.  I wrote in the last post that our friends' new boat was coming along and they had made some fairly definitive plans to have people aboard around the 23rd and be under way shortly thereafter, and so we had figured to scoot down to Miami and points south for a bit and then be back up in Palm Beach around that time.  Since then, however, additional complications have developed and they've had to scrub their plans for the 23rd; we're waiting to hear further on what, if any, new plan develops.  Having spent four months of a planned two in a boatyard, we understand completely, and don't really consider their various schedule hiccups to be anything out of the ordinary.

We learned of this when they came down to Fort Lauderdale shortly after my last post, to pick out some scuba gear in a nearby shop.  This shop is the one they were directed to by the outfit that installed the dive compressor and accessories on their new boat, and we were delighted to learn that it was just a mile and a half up the Middle River, and has its own dock, to boot.  We met them there at the shop and looked at some dive gear for ourselves as well, and I even dropped off my new-to-me used regulator to be inspected and serviced before use.

The dive shop graciously allowed us to leave our tender at their dock for the day, and we made a whole day of it.  We started with lunch across the street at an upscale burrito joint, visits to two more dive shops with different selections, and finishing with dinner at our old favorite, Coconuts, before they dropped us back off at our dinghy.  I've since been back to the dive shop to also have my buoyancy compensator serviced, and we ate at a nice steak-and-seafood place nearby.

We had figured again to maybe get underway by the middle of the week, but we decided to knock another project off the list first, getting the Spectra water maker up and running before any chance we might cross over to the Bahamas (where water is scarce and expensive).  I'm glad we did, because we had some problems with it, and there happens to be a Spectra service tech right here in Fort Lauderdale.  The earliest he could get to us was Friday, so we decided to just stay put.

I ended up picking him up at the CVS nearby, which has its own dock and has become our go-to place for convenience items such as milk, ice cream, beer, and even new batteries for our wrist-mounted dive computers.  I made it a point to pick up a few things after I dropped the Spectra guy back off, since we used not only their dock but also a parking space.

The upshot of the service visit was that our membrane is at the end of its life, and the high-pressure pump is showing some signs of wear.  Consequently we are getting only 8-9gph from a nominal 13gph water maker.  If we were, indeed, planning to head right off for an extended (several month) trip through the Bahamas and the Carribean, we'd at least replace the membrane (~$260) and consider rebuilding the HP pump (~$450).  At this point, any offshore trip we are contemplating would be at most a month or so, and 8-9gph along with starting with 500 gallons in our tank ought to be more than sufficient.

In the middle of all this was our anniversary, and we wanted to go out for a nice dinner.  We chose the upscale Italian bistro that was the first place we visited after anchoring near here upon our first arrival at Port Everglades.  It was very nice, if a little pricey, and the food was great.  Unfortunately, when we arrived this time, there were no empty slips in back as there had been on our first visit, so we had no convenient place to tie up.  After hunting around nearby for another spot, rejecting both English Park and the CVS as being too inconvenient, we reluctantly abandoned our plans.

It was a long dinghy ride in the other direction, but we ended up at the 15th Street Fisheries, which looked too casual on first inspection (when we saw it from the water taxi), but turns out to have a separate white-tablecloth dining room upstairs.  That was a perfect venue for an anniversary meal, with good food and a nice view over the Intracoastal Waterway.

Tonight we'll head downtown to our reciprocal club for an even nicer meal -- our anniversary fell on a Sunday, when the club is not open.  I expect, as is often the case, to be the only one on the Broward Transit bus wearing a sport coat on our way to dinner.  As nice as these places are, though, it has been equally nice eating on our aft deck for the past few days, here in our multi-million-dollar anchorage.  On our last grocery run to the Publix across from the park I picked up some nice lamb chops as well as steaks, and we've been taking advantage of the lovely weather to do some grilling.

The two weeks have flown by, and I need to get myself back up to Palm Beach again on Tuesday for my next follow-up eye appointment.  Between the full waste tank, nearly empty water tank, a dwindling diesel supply, and the need for ground transportation, we've made reservations for a couple of nights at the downtown city docks starting Monday.  Tuesday I will take the shuttle over to the Tri-Rail and take the train to West Palm Beach for my appointment, and we'll put a scooter on the ground to do some other errands.  Before we shove off Wednesday I will have the truck come and deliver a few hundred gallons of diesel, while we can still get it cheaper than marina rates.

I'm reluctant to prognosticate, since the plan seems to change daily, but at this writing we are thinking that after fueling Wednesday we will finally leave Fort Lauderdale, heading south down the ICW through Hollywood and Dania Beach towards Miami.  I'd like to spend a few days, at least, in the Miami/Key Biscayne area, and after that, it's a blank slate.  Depending on how we feel we might continue on to the Keys before coming back north.

Busy week

We are back at anchor in the Middle River, a bit further upriver from our last anchorage, at the junction with the "Rio Barcelona," one of the aforementioned canals (map).  To our south and west is Aqua Vista island, and to the northwest is Sunrise Key, both residential waterfront developments with very expensive houses, many fronted by even more expensive yachts.  Just north of us is a peninsula containing more high-end waterfront residential lots, but we can see the Galleria Mall and some commercial development beyond them.  We still have a view of the ICW to the east, but we are far enough from it that we seldom feel the wakes. That's our view from the foredeck, above.

We arrived here Monday morning after a brief cruise from our digs at the Las Olas city marina, where we were quartered on F-dock south of the bridge (map).  On our way south we cleared the bridge just by lowering our SSB antennas, but coming the other way it was nearly high tide and we had to request an opening, so we had a nice cruise south past Bahia Mar and back while we waited.


Vector at Las Olas Marina, snapped from the water taxi.  Venetian condos in the background.

We spent four nights at Las Olas, occasioned mostly by our very first "visitors," not counting random cruisers, boat show attendees, or our friends Martin and Steph (whom, it could be argued, are people we visited, rather than the other way around, while they ready their new boat).  Those visitors happened to be Louise's dad and stepmom, who were on their way from California to a trans-Atlantic cruise originating here in Fort Lauderdale.

We've made a standing offer to all our family and many of our friends to come visit us on the boat.  Understandably, no one until now has taken us up on it, owing, we presume, to geographic constraints.  My family is mostly in New Jersey and New York, with a small smattering in California, while Louise's family, as well as the vast majority of our friends, are in California.  A visit to the boat for most would require an airplane flight or at the very least a long drive.

I had really wanted to get the boat to New York last season, but the four-month stint in the boatyard, twice what we had hoped, ate away too much of the season, so the farthest north we reached was Baltimore.  That's a long and somewhat unpleasant drive from New York, so we were not surprised that no one wanted to come down.  Our California friends who want to see us on the boat are mostly content to wait until we get the boat to San Francisco, however, long that may take (the one set of friends who come east each year were in New York while the boat was still in the yard).

So when Jerry and Kay let us know they'd be embarking in Fort Lauderdale, we suggested they extend their trip by a few days and come see the boat -- briefly, as Kay is allergic to our cats.  We did not really know where we'd be, but we knew we'd at least be as close as Stuart, less than a two hour drive north.  As Martin and Steph's schedule evolved, we decided we could get a small head start on them and cruise down here to explore the southern end of the state, making it easy for us to meet up here.

We had a very nice visit, which included a rental car for the three days we were docked.  That let us get some needed shopping and errands in, which included a follow-up visit to the Viking life raft center in Miami, to pick up the old consumables from our re-certified raft that they had forgotten to send up with it.  As long as we were going to Miami, we decided to drag them along and make a day of it, driving back through Miami Beach and north along the barrier islands -- the Florida Riviera, as it were.  We cut back inland at Dania Beach, the last ICW crossing before Port Everglades.

In addition to being a pleasant day for all of us (well, other than the industrial stop at Viking), this gave us the chance to scope out the ICW between here and there.  We've done a good part of that before, on our very first training charter, which left from Dania Beach and went as far south as Boca Chita Key.  I mentioned that cruise here, but apparently never followed through on my promise to write it up later.  Ironically, we had planned to stop in Stuart at Trawler Fest later that month, a stop which was scrapped in favor of attending the presidential inauguration instead.

Driving north along the beach we passed what's left of "motel row" in Sunny Isles, where I stayed with my dad in the late 60s after my very first airplane flight.  We also went out on one of those deep-sea fishing charters that may well have been my first boat ride, and I remember the skipper briefly letting me take the helm up on the flying bridge, perhaps where I got the boat bug.  Fond memories; the Sahara, where we stayed, still stands, now a time-share condo complex.

As long as we were already at the marina, with Louise's folks a short walk across the street at a nearby hotel, we elected to take the Water Taxi downtown, affording us another opportunity to scope out some of the waterways ahead of time.  The inbound trip was well narrated, with the skipper pointing out many of the megayachts along the route and their history, as well as some of the more prominent properties along the waterway.  We had a nice lunch downtown, but the outbound crew did not provide any narration.  Still, I got to see how difficult it will be to get Vector up the New River to the other city docks, right downtown.  Those docks are less expensive than Las Olas, but, more importantly, they will let us get a fuel delivery there by tanker truck, which is a much better rate (~$3.65/gal) than either the marinas (~$4.75) or the roaming fuel barge (~$3.95).

When we are ready to fuel (either on this visit or on our way north on the rebound trip), we'll take a couple of nights there at the downtown docks, and have the truck fuel us on the way out.  That will give us the chance to stroll along Las Olas street downtown, with its myriad shops and restaurants.  It will also allow us to walk a few blocks to our reciprocal club here in Fort Lauderdale for a nice dinner high above the city.  There is one tricky narrow turn on the river, known as Tarpon Bend, between here and there, but if the Jungle Queen can make it, then so can we.

Las Olas marina (as well as the downtown city docks) has pumpouts at each slip, and after dropping Jerry and Kay at the cruise terminal, returning the rental car, and having a nice dinner along Fort Lauderdale Beach, we emptied our tanks Sunday night in preparation for a Monday morning departure.  That gives us nearly two weeks of anchoring before we again need to find a pumpout or else clear the three mile limit.


George relaxes on the flybridge at Las Olas marina.

We chose to come back here to the Middle River because we knew there was a nice, free dinghy landing at the George English Park just upriver.  That was important, because Tuesday I had a follow-up eye doctor appointment in Palm Beach.  I had originally planned to drop a scooter off while we were at Las Olas and ride up there along the beach route, which is 35mph the whole way.  But Louise found us a rental car for $19 just a few blocks from English Park, so we kept the scooters on deck and did that instead.  (There was no way I was going to pay for another two nights at a marina and keep a rental car for another two days just for one doctor appointment.)

The doctor's office was very accommodating in letting me move my morning appointment to the afternoon so we could also have dinner with Martin and Steph, who drove down from Stuart, and CJ and Margie who drove up from Delray Beach.  Martin brought me two packages that we had sent to their apartment after we left Stuart, and we all had a very nice dinner.

We returned to English Park around 9pm loaded with supplies, including two new deck chairs, that we had picked up in Palm Beach between the doctor's office and dinner.  The deck chairs, from Home Depot, were a bonus enabled by the fact that Enterprise Car Rental upgraded us to a nice SUV after they botched our pickup, leaving us waiting in the park for a full hour.

As I walked down the dock with a pair of chairs over my head, my heart sank as I saw the tender had been messed with.  The canvas cover over the console had been removed and the GPS was missing from the mount, all the compartments were open, and our stuff was everywhere.  Louise left me on the dock to deal with the mess while she moved the car from the park to an on-street space across the street.

Whenever we leave it, we always lock the dinghy to the dock with a strong cable, and the motor is locked to the hull.  Among other things, this keep mischievous kids from casting off the lines and setting the boat free.  So at least the important items, the boat itself and the outboard motor, were in place.  I had also installed a lock on the "glove box" where we keep the registration papers and a couple of cheap hand tools, and that compartment was not breached.

Clearly the miscreants found nothing at all of value.  Even the GPS, an ancient Garmin, was still aboard -- it had simply been broken off the mount and left dangling from its cable.  I can't be 100% sure nothing is missing, but I found most of the loose items from the other compartments strewn around the boat.  I'm trying to imagine what they thought they might find -- drugs, cash, iPhones, high-end stereos?  The sorts of things that one would expect to find -- life jackets, paddles, foot pump, anchor, anchor chain, even the starting battery, were all untouched.

I'm glad we locked up what we did, and we'll call it a lesson learned.  I will be installing padlock hasps on the anchor locker and under-seat compartment.  I will also through-bolt the GPS mount into the console, so that it can't be removed without tools and an opportunity of five or ten minutes or so.  In the meantime, no harm done, and we left the tender in the same spot yesterday all morning without incident.

The late start Tuesday due to the late pickup meant we missed some of the shopping we intended to do, so yesterday morning's project was to grab the rental car and head west to the giant outlet mall.  I buy most of my pants from the Lee/Wrangler/Timber Creek outlet store (AKA VF Outlet) and this is the nearest we will come to one for quite some time.  The mall is enormous, but we did not have time to explore it with the rental car due back at 1pm.

Between moving the boat twice, a family visit, and the whole rental car/eye doctor/shopping extravaganza, it has been a very busy week.  Today we are having a day of downtime, although we will probably dinghy someplace for dinner later.  Monday night I grilled steaks aboard, running the electric grill on battery power for the first time, and last night we had the leftovers as steak salad.

Louise is using the downtime to try her hand at something new: quilting. Steph is an advanced quilter; so much so that their boat Blossom has a room specifically designed to accommodate her hobby, with a built in sewing machine and special fabric storage cubbies. She made us a beautiful quilt as a boat-warming gift. The two ladies visited several quilt-specific stores while we were in Stuart and Louise caught the bug. Here is her first project, about half finished: pillow covers in a Bargello design to match Steph's gift.

We are still waiting to hear more from Martin and Steph on the expected completion schedule of their boat.  They have put a stake in the sand, though, with mutual friends Jeff and Pam coming out from California for a visit/cruise aboard starting May 23rd.  So we are taking that as a possible launch date for a cruise to the Bahamas, possibly departing from Palm Beach.

With a full three weeks between now and then, we will most likely cruise south to Miami and perhaps on to the northern keys before heading back up to Palm Beach to meet them.  That said, a lot can happen in three weeks, and we need to stay flexible in the event their commissioning project hits a hiccup.  We'll revisit the schedule when we are in Biscayne Bay and have a better idea where they are at.

Now that Thursday is upon us, we've decided to just spend the weekend right here in this anchorage.  Driving the boat around the ICW or up the New River on a weekend is not my idea of relaxation -- the waterways are crazy busy here on the weekends when the weather is nice.  We're getting WiFi here from a nearby hotel, there is convenient dinghy dock access, and we have a million-dollar view surrounded by extremely well-kept properties.  Come Monday, we will see whether we head up the New River for a few days, or south towards Miami.

The Venice of America

We are anchored in the Middle River, just inside its intersection with the ICW, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (map).  We arrived here Sunday afternoon, after a mostly pleasant cruise from Palm Beach via the Atlantic Ocean.  We remained just a mile or so offshore the whole cruise, so we had good cell coverage (and even Internet access), and I was able to make some holiday phone calls.

We were up early on Sunday to check the forecast, which had dropped to seas of just two to four feet with a period of nine seconds, and light winds out of the north.  We got under way at 8:15, and by the time we passed west of Peanut Island 45 minutes later we had made the decision to head outside, so we alerted our emergency contacts by text message and turned the SPOT tracker on.

This part of the Florida coast is mostly convex, so a near-shore route was the shortest.  We had already pumped out Friday while we were still in Stuart, so there was no need to proceed out to the three-mile limit, and a north wind means progressively rougher conditions the closer one gets to the gulf stream.  It was very pleasant having such a close-in cruise, as we were able to observe the various resorts along the way, many with impeccably manicured beaches filled with matching lounges and umbrellas.  It is the very tail end of spring break, so the beaches were busy but hardly full.  The highlight of the cruise was a close encounter with a pod of dolphins, perhaps a dozen or so, a couple of whom decided to frolic in our bow wave for a bit.

One consequence of the close-in route, though, is that we had to weave and dodge a bit to avoid dive charters and fishing boats.  We were nearly on top of one fisherman, with no day signals whatsoever, who frantically indicated as we approached that he had gear stretched out far shoreward of his position.  I barely managed to get stopped before running over his lines, then had to loop back around behind him.  He looked to have a decent boat and motor, but, clearly, he considers a VHF radio an unnecessary expense.

Most of these fishermen and divers, by the way, emerge from inlets along the route that are unnavigable to us: Boynton, Boca Raton, and Hillsboro.  In between inlets are great stretches of open water where all I need do is put my feet up on the console and look out the window, with an occasional glance at the radar and AIS.

Coming into Fort Lauderdale is another matter entirely.  The inlet, officially known as Port Everglades, is one of the busiest in Florida.  The port is controlled by a Vessel Traffic Service and we monitored their channel on our way in.  We had to hug the north side of the channel to make room for a 600+' barge coming out, and as we made the turn northward on the inside the enormous cruise liner Liberty of the Seas was just pushing off the dock.

Honestly, I am glad I had over 400 hours of experience and over 2,000 nautical miles under our keel before arriving here -- the sheer amount of marine traffic here is overwhelming, especially so on a pleasant Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend.  By the time we made the Las Olas bridge we were in a giant conga line of traffic, with 100+' megayachts sweeping past us in the opposite direction.  It does not help that half the channel under the bridge is currently obstructed by construction scaffolding as they work on the western spans.

Our plan upon arriving in this neighborhood had actually been to turn south just before our old friend Bahia Mar, and into a reportedly pleasant anchorage known as Lake Sylvia.  It is well off the ICW and protected on all sides, and it would have been a very nice place to spend the four days until our reservations at the city marina at Las Olas.  That said, it is a bit tricky to enter, with charted depths of seven to nine feet only along the very eastern edge of the channel, shoaling rapidly to four feet to the west.  I had some good local knowledge from a skipper we met in Stuart who takes his 80+ footer in there all the time.

Unfortunately, the persnickety depth sounder decided to act up again on our way south.  I had left it on for nearly two weeks in Stuart with nary a further problem, and it got us all the way down the ICW to Palm Beach without acting up.  Everything was fine all the way into the Atlantic and right up until my loop-around encounter with the fisherman.  We were in 80+' of water, but I had to turn shoreward briefly and I knew the bottom came up rapidly, so I checked the sounder only to be faced with a series of dashes where the depth and water temperature readings should have been.

That's not a problem in 80' in the ocean, but I knew we'd have big problems coming into any anchorages here in Fort Lauderdale without a working sounder.  Fortunately, I have a working spare and, in a pinch, we can hook it up and dangle it over the side to take a reading.  That's hardly useful, though, while driving the boat at six knots.

At this point in the trip, we still had more than three hours ahead of us in the ocean, and so I tightened up all the connections and left it powered down for an hour or so, which is how it cured itself last time.  When I powered it back up it came back to life, and has remained working since.  But now we don't trust it, and we don't want to chance being in a very narrow channel with questionable depths and little room to spin around if and when it quits again.  Thus we opted to bypass Lake Sylvia and head north of the bridge instead.

There are not a lot of places to anchor in Fort Lauderdale, and long-time cruisers remember a time when the city would cite you for anchoring here, before the state intervened and put a stop to the practice.  At the end of a long day of cruising, we wanted the first easy spot we could find, and this was it.  There's a nicer, more protected spot another half mile up the river, but we were just done, so we dropped the hook here.  An occasional wake from the ICW moves us around a bit, but we're between two no-wake zones and the big boys can't get going fast enough to rattle our 52 tons of displacement very much.  We thought about moving further upriver yesterday, but decided that we enjoy watching the traffic go by here, so we stayed put.

Yesterday we splashed the tender and headed upriver to Serafina Bistro, a waterside white-tablecloth Italian place, for a nice dinner.  This afternoon we will go a bit further upriver to the city park, conveniently located across the street from the Galleria shopping mall.  We'll probably take the tender to dinner once more before we weigh anchor and head over to the marina.

Fort Lauderdale is one of the few cities in the U.S. where one can explore a significant portion of the city from the water.  It bills itself as the "Venice of America" (notwithstanding there are cities elsewhere in the country, including Florida, named "Venice"), owing to the myriad canals criss-crossing the city in every direction.  Most are obstructed at one end or the other by fixed bridges or other impediments to navigation, but they are nevertheless filled with boats and yachts of every description, many of them over 100' in length.  My AIS currently shows 220 targets, and only a small percentage of boats have AIS transponders, and an even smaller percentage have them turned on.

We are looking forward to exploring the city in our tender, and by scooter once we are at the dock.  We are due at Las Olas Marina on Thursday morning, planning to arrive at slack tide.  We'll spend a few nights there before moving on to another anchorage for a few more days.  At this writing, our plans are a bit fuzzy for when we will leave or even which way we will head.  Most likely we will continue on to Miami when we have had our fill of "Venice."

Escape from Stuart

We are anchored at the north end of Lake Worth (the lake, not the eponymous village), in the town of North Palm Beach, Florida (map). Notwithstanding my last post, wherein I opined that we might shove off Wednesday morning, the weather for an outside run deteriorated, and we held off for another couple of days hoping for good weather on the outside.

When Friday rolled around, and the forecast on the outside was still bleak, getting bleaker over the weekend and into next week, we conceded defeat and decided to shove off regardless and take the inside route down the ICW.  We did not want to chance waiting in Stuart so long that we'd have a mad scramble to make our reservations in Fort Lauderdale.

Martin and Steph spent Thursday night aboard with us, so that Steph could ride with us without them having to get up extra early and drive down from Jensen Beach.  We cast off lines at 8:45 and Martin headed next door to the Nordhavn docks to work on their boat, Blossom.  Even with the rough forecast on the outside, we had a very smooth and pleasant run on the inside.  The depth transducer had nary a problem the whole way down.

Once we had the anchor set here we splashed the tender, for the first time since we left St. Augustine, at the very beginning of January -- nearly four months.  It took me a few tries to get it going, but it did eventually start, and I took it for a spin around the nearby Old Port Cove marina, where we planned to go for dinner, just to blow the cobwebs out.  It was very reassuring to finally have a working fuel gauge, and all the other systems seemed to be working normally.

We made a dinner reservation for the four of us at Sandpiper Cove, the nice restaurant at Old Port Cove, and after a cocktail on the aft deck and some conversation we tendered over with Steph and her luggage, meeting Martin in the restaurant.  It was a great final evening with them until we reconnect in late May sometime, and it was hard to say goodbye at the end of the evening after nearly three months of being conveniently only a few miles away.

This morning we had intended to move a little further south along the ICW, enjoying another two or three anchorages on our way to Fort Lauderdale.  I was up early, but with only 45 miles left on the inside route, there was no rush, and we had a leisurely morning aboard.  Mid-morning, Louise started the generator to make hot water for a shower, even though our new battery system was far from needing to be charged,  That's when the plans for the day went off the rails.

The generator sounded a bit different -- hardly surprising since it has not been run since before we docked in Lake Park at the beginning of March.  Louise checked the exhaust for water flow, and, to her horror, discovered only exhaust gas, with no water, emanating from the generator discharge.  Not good.  We immediately shut the generator back down.  Fortunately, it had only run for perhaps a minute, not long enough to melt the exhaust hoses or start a fire.

I suspected a damaged impeller.  We opted to finish our morning coffee before diving in, although I did shut off a few discretionary pieces of equipment, such as the AIS and plotters, to keep the battery load down until we were sure we could restart the generator.  After breakfast I changed into my work clothes and started in on the generator, peeling off the sound shield covers.

Fortunately, the raw water impeller is pretty easy to access on this generator -- much easier than the one on the main engine.  Sure enough, the impeller was more or less completely destroyed.  Worse, I did not find much of the debris still in the housing, which meant is was further downstream and likely lodged in the heat exchanger.

The heat exchanger on this unit is accessed by removing a very weird double-bell/double-clamp rubber end cap.  When I had both clamps loose, bright red coolant immediately started coming out around the end cap.  It took me a while to realize that the inner clamp, on the smaller portion of the bell, closed around the inner, seawater-conducting, part of the exchanger, while the outer bell sealed around the outer coolant-containing portion, with the inner tube being a loose press-fit inside the outer housing.  It's a poor design requiring the otherwise sealed coolant system to be drained to access the seawater path.

It took some serious gymnastics on my part, but I was eventually able to get a cup and funnel under the exchanger's drain petcock, incoveniently located at the very back of the sound enclosure.  I drained about a quart or so of coolant, which let me get the end cap off without further incident.  Behind the end cap I found a considerable number of broken impeller pieces trapped at the inlet tubes.

Once I had all the pieces out it was pretty straightforward to get everything put back together, top the system off with fresh coolant, and install the replacement impeller.  Water flow from the generator exhaust is now better than we have ever seen since we bought the boat, suggesting that this problem has been brewing for a while.  I'm just glad we caught it before damage was done, and I am now thinking about adding a temperature switch to the generator run system which will shut it down if the wet exhaust hose rises above 200 or so.

It was well after lunch time by the time we finished and I had everything cleaned up.  As long as the tender was still in the water from last night's dinner run, we lined it around to the front of the boat so I could look at the bow eye shackle pin, which appeared to have broken it's mousing and backed out of the shackle several turns.  I noticed this during a routine check of the snubber yesterday evening before turning in.

When I got to the bow eye I found the stainless seizing wire we had used to mouse the shackle broken, and the pin backed out of the threads almost completely.  However, the pin itself was completely frozen to the bow eye, in which it was a tight-clearance fit by design.  Louise kept handing me down tools, staring with the four pound engineer hammer, and progressing through three sizes of pipe wrenches, but nothing I tried could free the pin enough to rotate it back into the threads on the shackle.

The silver lining here is that, with the pin this jammed, it is unlikely to come free and let the shackle loose.  Unfortunately, the single thread of engagement on one side is not really sufficient to carry the anchoring load in a big blow.  We will need to find a way to free the pin, clean out the bow eye, and replace the whole shackle assembly at some point.  In the meantime, I moused the pin to the shank of the bow eye itself with some light line, and declared it "good enough."

By this time, we had decided it was not really worth raising anchor just to go another few miles down the ICW, and besides, the forecast for outside has improved and it looks like we might be able to take the outside route all the way to Fort Lauderdale if we leave here in the morning.  We opted instead to just have a relaxing afternoon on board, and stay right here.  It's a pleasant holiday weekend, and several small boats pulling water skiers ran around the anchorage all afternoon.  Some of the wipeouts inspired us to make number signs, such as used by, for example, Olympic skating judges, to hold up when one happened nearby.  After that, three young men skiing from a very small outboard hammed it up for us the rest of their stay.

This is a very popular anchorage, and there are perhaps twenty other boats here, although we chose to anchor some distance from the pack.  One reason for this is that there is a small beach next to PGA boulevard where you can land your dinghy and walk to some shopping and restaurants.  I needed to resupply myself with eye drops, which I am consuming at a prodigious rate, and we were nearly out of beer, so I decided to dinghy in for some quick supplies before we hoisted the tender back aboard.  Louise decided to join me and we got beer, eye drops, fruit, and milk.  We already had dinner cooking, or we might have also decided to stay ashore and sample one of the restaurants.

It turned out to be a very enjoyable day, and we're glad we just stayed put.  The generator impeller was probably overdue for a change anyway, so it's hard to complain that I had a pleasant, calm anchorage in which to do it.  Mostly, it feels great to be back cruising, and away from the dock.

If the weather forecast holds, we may get an early start tomorrow and head outside.  With four days before we are due, though, it will be no problem to continue down the inside route, should that be our mood as we pass Peanut Island.

Counting down while down for the count

We are in our final week here in Stuart, counting down the days to our planned departure, currently slated for Wednesday morning.  I have another follow-up with the eye surgeon Tuesday morning, and I am hoping that my vision will have improved enough by then that I am fully functional.  That has decidedly not been the case thus far, so not much has gotten done around here over the last week.

My left, "LASIK" eye is great, with near-perfect vision, and I have been relying on it for nearly everything.  The right, "PRK" eye, while now focusing to better than 20/40, is still quite fuzzy due to the ongoing corneal healing.  One consequence of the two eyes being quite different is that I can't get a pair of reading glasses that works for both, and so I have been useless for close-up work.  Even reading and working on the computer is a challenge right now and I am limiting my time.  For the first few days after surgery, about all I could do was sit and converse, so we are happy to have the convenient company of friends here.


Re-certified raft in its cradle, before strapping it down.

It gets better every day, and I've been able to ride the scooter and get a few projects done that don't require close stereoscopic vision.  We got our life raft back and I mounted it to the boat deck, horizontally just behind the aft rail, and with the painter now attached in the proper place.  Louise sewed a spiffy cover for it out of Sunbrella fabric so we can keep it out of the sun, hoping to avoid the UV-related container damage it's been suffering exposed on the rail.


Raft weather cover, glistening in the morning dew. "Bump" at top right is the hydrostatic release, which is a couple of inches proud of the canister.  The cover is held on only by a shock-cord gather around the bottom, so it will come off with the raft should the boat sink.

The last of the new LED replacement bulbs for the tender arrived and I decided to install it, which prompted me to spend an afternoon up there working on things.  For example, I added an hour meter to the tender, so we have some clue as to when maintenance is due, and also so we can get a better handle on how much fuel is being used.


Tender fuel tank exposed.  Recalcitrant sender is right in the middle.

Speaking of fuel, the fuel gauge has been inoperative since we got it, which is a real liability with the built-in tank and no reserve supply.  When I first looked at this a few months ago, I found the gauge itself had never been properly connected, but correcting that problem revealed that the sender was also bad, reading a direct short to ground.  In for a penny, in for a pound, so as long as I was working on the tender I cut through the sealant and removed the floor over the fuel tank.  It turned out the sender shorted when the nut fixing the sender wire had been severely over-tightened, and I was able to repair it with some pliers and re-install it without having to hunt down a replacement.

In my last post I mentioned that our depth transducer had stopped working, and I ordered a replacement.  The first two places I tried were happy to take my order for items allegedly "in stock," only to email me a day later to say it was back-ordered.  I eventually found one and it arrived this week.  Imagine my surprise, though, when the old one was mysteriously working again when I powered the system back up, in preparation for testing the replacement.  We left it on and it has been working ever since.  The replacement has been set aside as a backup -- these kinds of intermittent failures trouble me perhaps more than anything else.

We've also had painters on the boat on and off for the last week, touching up rust spots as I mentioned in my last post.  They made a rookie mistake, though, grinding down to the steel on the edge of the transom without cleaning up the grinding dust.  When we washed the boat after they had finished, we noticed rust spots from the dust all over the swim step.  They came yesterday to remove the rust, and while the rust is gone, the paint is also irreparably damaged.  They are supposed to come back today to completely repaint the swim platform, but we are concerned that weather may intervene, in which case our planned departure date will be in jeopardy.


Grill cover in place.  There will be a zipper in the front when it's finished; Louise did not have one on hand.

As long as Louise had the sewing machine out for the life raft cover, she also made a cover for the BBQ grill, and fixed some clothing items to boot.  (We try not to fall into gender-normative roles around here, but the sewing machine baffles me.)  We've both been also busy getting everything aboard squared away for our departure, and we even made provisioning runs to Costco and the grocery store in our friends' rental car.  Things are definitely starting to feel cruise-ready.



George has been hanging in there, and many thanks to everyone who sent her well-wishes.  We've increased her sub-cue fluids to every other day, and she has her ups and downs.  We are thankful for every day we have with her.  Lately, she's been wanting to sleep on the same pillow with my head at night, which is a concern now that I am no longer wearing eye shields.  She manages to sneak in there without waking me, and I notice her when I roll over.

At this writing the weather is still looking good for an outside run on Wednesday, and it looks like Stephanie might join us for the run to Palm Beach, with Martin meeting us there for dinner.  That will still allow us a full week before our reservations in Fort Lauderdale, and we'd likely do two more hops with a pair of days between each.  Once we are on the move, I will be updating here more frequently, returning to my practice of one post from each stop.

Game changer

I was hoping to keep to no longer than two weeks between posts while we remain here in Stuart, but I seem to have gone over by a bit. I've been somewhat out of commission for the past couple of days, and even today typing is an effort. That's because I had refractive surgery Friday. Yesterday I merrily tossed two pairs of glasses and three pairs of contact lenses in the trash, and for the first time in 45 years I can see the walls when I wake up. Well, sort of -- I am still having to wear clear plastic shields taped over my eyes while I sleep.

I promise to get to an update on Vector momentarily, but for the curious among my family and friends, I will first share a few more details. Those who have known me a long time know that I was extremely nearsighted -- worse than 20/400, which is the maximum on the chart -- and I also had astigmatism. More casual acquaintances might never have known this, because I have worn hard contact lenses for the past 40 years, which corrected my vision completely.

One consequence of being blind without glasses or contacts is that I have been denied the simple pleasure of swimming, diving, and other water sports without worry.  Wearing the glasses there was always a worry they would come off, even with a sports strap (and they did just that, once, in the wave pool at Disney's Blizzard Beach), and many water parks even make you take them off before boarding some of the rides.  With my contacts in, I could not open my eyes under water or when being splashed.  As much as I like the water, though, it's been a small enough percentage of my life that I was willing to put up with all this rather than take on the risks (and pain) of refractive surgery.

Now that I live on a boat, surrounded by water almost every minute, and we are on the cusp of entering waters where I will be tempted to jump in virtually every day, I decided to take the plunge, if you will excuse the pun.  After a great deal of research I chose LASIK, with a well-experienced surgical team here in Stuart.  We knew we'd be here for at least two months, and one of the requirements for surgery is to stop wearing hard contact lenses at least that far in advance.

All well and good, but between my New Jersey nose and my pronounced brow reminiscent of neanderthals, they had a very hard time "docking" the flap-creating laser to my eyes.  I ended up having the LASIK procedure on the left eye, where they were ultimately able to dock the laser, and the PRK procedure on my right one, where they could not.  The PRK procedure has fewer risks and often results in better vision, but there is more post-operative discomfort and vision is distorted for days to weeks afterwards.  The good news is that I already see perfectly, well enough even to drive, with my uncorrected left eye.  I have some more follow-up appointments this week, but I should be seeing nearly perfectly with the right one, too, in another couple of weeks.

In the meantime, work has proceeded apace here aboard Vector.  I've finally gotten the dinghy chocks properly secured to the deck, and Louise managed to sew the dinghy cover back together after its longitudinal seam ripped open in a windstorm.  I also removed, refurbished, and reinstalled the dinghy's battery disconnect switch, which was so badly corroded that the whole electrical system was intermittent.  While I was at it, I upgraded the navigation lights to LEDs.

The electronics at the helm are finally 100% complete, and ASUS turned my laptop repair around in record time so we even have the nav computer back where it belongs.  Unfortunately, the depth transducer seems to have given up the ghost, a fact I learned when I put the nav computer back for testing.  I've ordered a replacement transducer, but the boat will need to be hauled out to replace it, turning a $300 part into a $1,000 project.  That needs to get done before we leave -- we can hardly navigate out of Stuart without it.

Also since last I posted here, we attended the Palm Beach boat show with Martin and Steph, where we ended up ordering our offshore medical kit (minus the AED, which we already have). That's mostly on board now, except we are still waiting on a pair of oxygen cylinders, which come via a different shipper.  Once we get our life raft back, scheduled for Tuesday, we will finally be fully equipped for an offshore passage.

A contractor here at the yard has been busy touching up all our rust spots, and we even sprang for a professional wash job.  I finally installed the test port for the watermaker, for when we get back out into open water, and I reconnected the aft deck shower and the watermaker flush port with some new PEX and fittings, tossing another three dozen feet of nasty-looking vinyl hose off the boat.

I made up a portable sediment filter for the fresh water fill hose, to keep gunk from getting in the tank in the first place, and I replaced the backlights on the rudder angle indicators with LED items, as the one on the flybridge had burned out recently.  I also removed one of the fixed shelves in the large locker in the master head, so Louise could reorganize in there with a nicer multi-drawer organizer.  Louise, meanwhile, also got the taxes done and off to the CPA.

So the boat has come along nicely, and once the depth sounder is replaced, we will be ready to cruise.  We've been enjoying the great weather and the company of friends here in Stuart.  We'd be happy as clams, but our happiness is tempered by the fact that our most loving cat, George, is deteriorating rapidly.  She slowed down so much, and started eating so little, that we brought her to the vet early last week, despite having her on subcutaneous fluids twice a week.  Her BUN and creatinine had skyrocketed since her episode in November, and even her phosphorous was elevated.  The vet kept her for two whole days to flush her out with IV fluids.

While the kidney values are much improved (at the expense of increased anemia), she is still moving very slowly and not eating much.  We honestly do not know how much longer she has left.  We are increasing her sub-cu to every other day, and trying to tempt her with whatever food she will eat, as the kidney diet is no longer appealing to her.  She does not seem uncomfortable, but it is very hard to watch the decline, and we are very sad.

At this writing, we are still on track for shoving off here mid-month.  By then my eyes should be nearly fully recovered and we should have been hauled out for the depth transducer, either here at Apex, or at nearby Hinckley if the Apex lift can't fit us.  Our first stop on the way south will be Palm Beach, and we'll take the outside route, weather permitting.  Steph might join us just for the ride, with Martin meeting us down there in the car, depending on where they are in their commissioning process.

Open Season

We are back at Apex Marine in Stuart, FL, albeit in a different spot than the one we left for Trawler Fest (map).  We arrived in high wind and mid-ebb, and it was all I could do to get the boat to the end tie on the south end of the dock, arriving as we did on the weekend, when there was no one around to tell us where to dock or help with lines.  We decided we like it here on the end, and the marina let us keep the spot, although I did turn the boat around at slack a day or so later, so we could off-load the scooters.

We've been here a full two weeks already, and the time has gotten away from me.  I keep thinking I will have a quiet hour or two in which to post to the blog, but the quiet time never comes.  I confess that I am looking forward to having most of the "heavy lifting" behind me so we can enjoy the boat without the Projects of Damocles hanging over me.

That's not to say that it has been all work and no play.  On the contrary, we've been enjoying the occasional evening out with Martin and Steph, or just the two of us, and we even made a jaunt to Fort Lauderdale, where the four of us enjoyed cocktails with our friends Dave and Carole, whom we met in Baltimore, aboard Buccaneer.  We even took some time this weekend for a late breakfast and a visit to the Arts Fest in Memorial Park, downtown, followed by a quick tour through the farmers' market.

The weather has been perfect over the last week or so, which is a mixed blessing.  It means boating season is entering full swing here, and on the weekends there are some number of inconsiderate skippers who blast by here in heavy boats on full plane, sending shock waves throughout the marina.  Sunday one particularly bad wake sent us crashing into the top of a piling, scuffing the paint on the edge of the boat deck.  By the time we got hit, the offender was too far away to get a name -- skippers are (in theory, anyway) responsible for any damage done by their wakes.

Mostly, though, I have been working on the boat since we returned.  The trip to Lake Park was something of a sea trial for some of the work I did during our first month here, including the new chart plotter setup as well as the new electrical system.  While we only anchored one night on that trip, I'm happy to report that the batteries, inverter, and new alternator all worked like a charm.  The chart plotter, though, had some issues.

The new chart plotting system had worked flawlessly on our way to Stuart back in January, when it was connected via a single serial port to our old SeaCas setup, which provided both GPS position and AIS target information in a single datastream.  That was a temporary arrangement, though, as we really need to have it connected to the new Furuno FA-100 class-A AIS transponder, along with a separate GPS position receiver as well as the autopilot system, so it can drive the boat.  Here in Stuart I upgraded the single-port serial interface to a four-port model, removed the SeaCas system (whose former antennas are now connected to the FA-100), and wired the FA-100, a GPS, and the AP20 autopilot to three of the four new ports.

At the dock, it all appeared to work as expected.  But when we got underway to Lake Park, the ship's position icon seemed to be jumping around, and our ground track looked like we had had a few beers before setting out.  Slowing down to anchoring speeds in Palm Beach, and while docking in Lake Park, the track was a bit more revealing: we appeared to be moving in short hops of straight lines, due east-west, due north-south, or, occasionally, at a 45 degree angle.


Our very squared-off track in Lake Park.  Click for full size to eliminate any moiré effect.

That suggested that one of the position inputs was wonky.  The primary position source should have been the dedicated GPS, and this was the same unit that had been driving our old Northstar plotter quite successfully before the plotter itself gave up the ghost.  But I knew that the AIS was also providing a position input, embedded in the "own ship" information feed, that it was passing along from the Furuno radar/chartplotter system, and backed up by its own internal GPS.

Reasoning that either the two position sources, differing as they did by a few feet due to antenna locations, were causing the charted position to jump back and forth rapidly, or that one of the three GPS systems was providing bad data, I tried alternately disconnecting each of these two systems from the chartplotter on our way back to Stuart.  I also tried forcing the AIS onto its internal GPS by powering down the radar.  None of that changed the symptom, and we had a drunken trail most of the way back to Stuart as well.  Since we came back via the inside route, I did not have much opportunity to fiddle with it, as I needed to focus on driving the boat.  Ironically, the jumping around on the plotter was much more of a problem on the inside route than it would have been in the ocean.

We we very nearly all the way back to the marina when it finally occurred to me to disconnect the autopilot from the plotter.  This connection exists so that the plotter can send course information to the autopilot, to steer the boat.  But it is bi-directional, so that the autopilot can provide heading information (basically, the way the boat is pointed, as opposed to the direction in which it is traveling) to the plotter.  This lets you see at a glance that you are pointed one way, but moving another (for example, due to wind or current).  Et voila, the jumping around stopped immediately, our position was dead accurate, and our track was smooth.  We left the autopilot disconnected from the plotter for the remainder of the trip (we never let the plotter drive except in wide open water anyway).


Our much curvier smooth tracks from maneuvering into the slip here in Stuart.

It took me a while to track it down, but it turned out that, even though the documentation says the autopilot sends only heading sentences on output #2 (where the plotter is connected), it was actually sending a whole panoply of sentences, including GPS position sentences.  It was getting the GPS position from the Furuno radar/plotter, which is connected to input/ouput port #1 (so we can drive the boat from that system, too, if need be).  That alone probably would not have caused this problem, but apparently the autopilot was truncating the last two decimal places from the GPS position sentences.  Moreover, it was sending ten times as many position reports as either of the two actual GPS inputs. Having two fewer digits of position data yields the squared-off, stair-step plot that we were seeing.  The jumping would happen when a more accurate report arrived from one of the GPS units, immediately followed again by a less precise report from the autopilot.

I called Simrad to ask about this and they immediately knew the answer, as it is a known problem.  After having me check my software version they informed me that the problem had been fixed in a later (and final) release.  In the case of our now-antique unit, upgrading the software requires installing a new ROM, which any dealer will be happy to sell me for upwards of $200.  Instead I simply turned off the input from the autopilot on the plotter -- the pilot will still get commands from the plotter, but the plotter will not hear the pilot babbling away.  The plotter will get heading information from the AIS (which gets it from the autopilot in the first place) while we are under way, and we'll just forego having the heading display when we are at anchor unless we also keep the AIS powered up.

This is now my second interaction with Simrad (the first being when the Northstar quit working), and I would be hard-pressed to ever buy another piece of equipment from them.  By contrast, Furuno has been phenomenal in supporting their older gear on Vector, while they have yet to charge me a penny.  When I am in the market for a new radar or other dedicated marine electronics, they will be the first place I look.

Shortly after we returned here, the new VHF radio I ordered in Miami arrived.  We've been having some signal quality problems with the venerable Icom 602 in the pilothouse.  On top of the signal issues, the DSC is nearly impossible to use, and the loudhailer's fog repertoire lacks an anchor bell function.  It was a bit of an impulse buy, but I got a great deal on Standard Horizon's new top-of-the-line radio, which in addition to having user-friendly DSC operation and a fog bell, also has a built-in AIS receiver/display and its own built-in GPS.  The AIS is redundant aboard Vector, but having it built right into the radio means we can contact any AIS target via DSC with just a couple of button presses, rather than having to copy the MMSI off the AIS or plotter and enter it into the radio.


New radio installed, showing AIS "plotter" display and position.  I need to make a trim plate to cover the larger hole from the older radio.

The new radio looks and works great, but it is considerably smaller than the Icom and I will need to make a trim plate of some sort to cover the larger hole in the console.  I think I can get a fair amount of money for the old radio, but I first need to have Icom blank out our MMSI.  If that proves too troublesome or expensive, I'll just box it up and stow it as a spare.

While I was under the helm installing the new radio and wrapping up the plotter issues, I discovered some mis-wired grounds, and I am still in the process of cleaning those up.  I also took the opportunity to fish a CAT-5 up to the overhead and installed the proper exterior cable for the WiFi amplifier, which heretofore has been running on a jury-rigged cable hanging exposed from the pilothouse ceiling.  I hope to have all the under-helm work (for now) finished in the next couple of days, so I can replace all the safety gear that stows under there, which is currently strewn around the pilothouse.

Among the safety gear is a Zoll AED, which this month decided it needs new batteries.  That's straightforward enough, but in the process of looking up batteries I learned it also needs a software update.  As if I did not already have enough to do, that's one more project on the list.  As long as I am on the subject of safety gear, the life raft also needs to be re-certified, and I took it off its mounts in preparation for bringing it in for service.  In the process I discovered it had been installed upside down.  I'll be moving the bracket anyway before re-installing it, as the old position on the starboard rail of the boat deck made it the widest thing on the boat, and more than once I had to dodge a piling threatening to knock it off the boat.


Upside-down raft canister.  This cord, which serves as the painter and also activates the inflator, is supposed to be on top.

I actually typed all the foregoing paragraphs Sunday afternoon, with the best of intentions to finish up and get this posted on Monday, making an even two weeks since my last update.  But Monday morning I had my first consultation at the ophthalmologist for Lasik surgery, and they dilated my eyes, which kept me off the computer the rest of the day.  Instead, I put on very dark sunglasses and we hitched a ride with Steph, on her way to Fort Lauderdale to pick Martin up from the airport, so we could drop the life raft off at Viking in Miami for service.

In the back of the Viking warehouse I felt like a very insignificant drop in a very large ocean.  The huge facility was stacked to the rafters with enormous canisters of ship-sized rafts awaiting service.  One whole section was dedicated to Carnival Cruises, for example, and if you've ever been aboard a cruise ship you've seen dozens of these, looking a bit like oversized 55-gallon drums on their sides, racked on the decks to supplement the hard-sided lifeboats.  The young lady taking my service order assured me that I did not have the smallest raft -- they make one size smaller than ours.  At least I know we are in good company with our six-person, offshore rated raft with IMO-compliant emergency equipment pack.

So surely Tuesday I could have finished this diatribe and gotten it posted.  Ha.  While I was reading my morning news over my first cup of coffee, the screen on my fairly new Asus laptop went kaput.  As in not readable at all.  I cleared a spot on the chart table, heretofore piled high with project paraphernalia, so I could plug the laptop into the same monitor we use for the chartplotter.  Fortunately, the rest of the laptop was fully operational, but there went my whole day, as I then spent the rest of the day arranging for warranty repair, backing up all my data, and clearing off any confidential information in preparation for sending it in.  We dropped it at the post office yesterday evening; ironically, it is going to Milpitas, California, where I lived for several years.  I have my fingers crossed that we'll have it back here before we want to shove off, mid-April.


Hmm.  I can't read this at all...

I'm now back to using my old laptop, which you might recall was recently re-purposed as the new chart plotter at the helm.  It took a while for me to get all my email and other items synced back up to this computer, and it's a little clunky, but it will suffice until I get my new one back.  It still has all the charts on it, too, so it can quickly be put back at the helm should we need to get under way.

Speaking of laptops, when we are under way, Louise sets hers on the table at the pilothouse settee, where she is generally seated while I am driving.  She has the same chart software loaded, and this gives us two sets of eyes on the charts.  Moreover, I can ask her, for example, to scroll ahead, or to read the details of some chart object such as a marina or anchorage, without having to divert the screen of the main chart plotter for that function.  Up to now, we've been using one of those USB-connected GPS "pucks" to show our position on her computer.  Naturally, the puck does not get a great signal inside the aluminum pilothouse, and, having it positioned as near as practical to the port side window for this reason, her display always shows us a little to the left of where our main plotters show us.

Having removed the SeaCas AIS unit to make way for the Furuno FA-100 transponder, I saw an opportunity here to ditch the puck and its clumsy cable running across the settee, get her a more accurate updated position fix, and add AIS targets to her display all in one fell swoop, and so I ordered an inexpensive car-top GPS antenna and a "rubber ducky" VHF antenna made for handhelds and re-installed the SeaCas unit in the flybridge coaming, running the output down to her position on the settee.  I also installed a power outlet in the settee, so she no longer has to drape the cord around to the galley.


Amplified GPS antenna and flexible VHF antenna installed on the flybridge.  The receiver is under the coaming and wired to the pilothouse settee area.

So this might be taking redundancy to the point of absurdity, but we now have aboard Vector three separate AIS receivers, four working VHF transceivers, four fully separate chart plotters with their own position inputs, and six dedicated GPS receivers.  And that's not counting three Android phones and one iPad, all with their own GPS receivers, as well as the aforementioned puck, which can be added to a third laptop, if needed, for chart display.  The only way we can get lost is if the GPS constellation goes dark, and even then, we carry paper charts and know how to dead reckon.

All of the re-wiring of NMEA inputs and outputs to get all this working was the excuse I needed to finally clean up the mess under the helm that formerly passed for an NMEA "junction," and now it's all wired through a compression terminal block and properly labeled.  The depth transducer is also now connected to the radar/plotter as well as the numerical display, so we can get a graphic picture of the bottom, and the depth is also being passed to the PC plotter, so it can be correlated directly with the depths on the chart.


Not the prettiest, but a far cry from the way it was, and more flexible and functional.  I was a bit too limited on real estate to dress all the wires off squarely.

While I was under the helm I also installed a wireless remote for the anchor windlass.  One of the two foot switches crapped out a few months ago, and I've been having to work the windlass from the helm, with Louise giving me instructions over the headsets.  I'd like to fix the foot switch, too, but I'm worried removing it will damage the paint, and I want to wait until we are having paint work done on the foredeck.

I still have a lot left to do before we are ready to take the boat out of sight of land.  The life raft bracket needs to be bolted down in its new location, the new tender chocks need to be secured, the water maker needs to be serviced, and a host of smaller projects needed to be ticked off the list.  I have another three weeks or so of relative calm here in Stuart, and I am hoping to have the boat open-ocean-ready by the time we leave.

As it stands now, our plan is to shove off from here mid-April and head to Fort Lauderdale, where we will spend a week or so visiting folks.  After that, things are a bit fuzzier, but we'll either continue south to Miami and the keys, or else head east to the Bahamas.  We'll remain in these southerly latitudes until June or so, when we plan to head north along the US east coast for what is likely the last time in the foreseeable future.

With any luck, it will be something less than another two weeks before I post here again.  For one thing, I need to commit the 24-volt upgrade project to writing before it fades too much from memory, and for another, these gargantuan updates are a bear to type.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to try to sell a VHF radio, an inverter, and maybe a bus.

That's a wrap

We are at the Lake Park municipal marina, along the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) in Lake Park, Florida (map).  We are on the floating docks on the south side of the basin; the Trawler Fest show completely consumed the fixed docks on the north side, and the marina was completely overwhelmed when we arrived.  We ended up station-keeping in the basin for several minutes while they figured out who we were and directed us to our spot.

While we are only a couple hundred feet from the show boats by water, it's a long walk around the basin by land.  Still, it was nice to just be able to walk to the show; apparently, most of the staff, vendors, and attendees are in hotels across the ICW, a 15 minute or so drive.  We were able to walk home for lunch, and stumble home with no worries after the nightly cocktail parties.

We had a great time.  We did not find anything here that we needed to purchase, and there were only a handful of boats that were new to us from which we could get some ideas, but we reconnected with a dozen or so old friends, and made some new ones, too.  The connections we make at these shows have been great sources of information for our cruising life.

We docked starboard-side-to and so were unable to offload the scooters, so we really have not gone further afield than a few blocks from the marina.  There is a grocery store a very short walk from the dock, which has come in handy with four of us aboard, and a nice white-tablecloth restaurant, the Pelican Cafe, a few blocks north, where we had dinner before the show started.

The show wrapped up last night, and many of the exhibitor boats have already left.  We've decided to move along as well, and with no other particular destination in mind, we've decided to head back to Stuart with Martin and Steph.  They need to be back this evening, so we'll shove off this morning near slack water and head north.  Conditions outside are not great, and we'd hit the St. Lucie Inlet at an unfavorable tide, so we'll instead take the inside route up the ICW.